Development of an Eastern Mediterranean Region search strategy for biomedical citations indexed in PubMed

摘要

PubMed, a ‘barrier-free’ bibliographic database covering biomedical and health disciplines, has been successfullyused to identify a multitude of indicators that assist in analyzing global trends for biomedical research productivity. Thecurrent study represents an original attempt to develop and optimize an Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) search strategyin PubMed to pave the way for subsequent descriptive analyses. The refined EMR search strategy contains elaborate syntaxeswhich facilitate controlling the search process and maintaining a proper balance between sensitivity and precision of theobtained results. Country-specific citation data were manually scanned for false positive publications. Our results indicatethat publication productivity increased nearly five-fold in the EMR from 2004 to 2013. Five countries (Islamic Republic of Iran,Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Pakistan; in order of total publications) contributed to 80% of all EMR publications during thisperiod. Each of the remaining 17 EMR countries contributed less than 4%. We believe that the methodology presented in thisstudy can be used in conjunction with other metrics to extract invaluable indicators to describe EMR health research systems.