[Analysis of publications on infectious diseases. A comparative study of ten countries in the period 2000-2009]

We analyse the productivity and visibility of Spanish publications on the subject category of infectious diseases in the period 2000-2009 and compared with the corresponding nine other countries.

We used the database Web of Science. Analysis (annual and five-year) was restricted to the citable documents. The bibliometric indicators used were the number of publications, the amount of citations, median and interquartile range of the citations and the h-index Hirsch.

There were 76,491 publications (84.1% were original articles) with a percentage increase of 20% between the two periods. The ten countries with over 50,000 citations were the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Holland, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Australia. 24.8% of publications in international collaboration was made and received 29.9% of the total citations. 47.1% of the publications corresponding to the first quartile journals and received 68.1% of the total citations. The median of citations for all publications was 9 (interquartile range: 4-21). Spain was the fifth country in the world by number of publications, the seventh by citations received, and the eighth by the h index. Spain was the country with the lowest percentage of publications in the first quartile (40.2%), and international collaboration (26.7%).

In the period 2000-2009 analysed we observed a high production of publications by Spanish authors, with a high growth rate, and a prominent position in the total number of citations received by publications.