Productivity of Spanish emergency physicians in the 5-year periods from 2005 to 2009 and 2000-2004

Miró O, Valcárcel De La Iglesia MA, Cremades Pallas RM, Burillo-Putze G, Julián Jiménez A, Martín Sánchez FJ

Objective: To analyze the productivity of Spanish emergency physicians from 2005 to

2009 and compare the results to the previous 5-year period.

Methods: We used the Science Citation Index (SCI)-Expanded database and we manually

revisted titles published from 2000 to 2007 in the Journal Emergencias. Articles authored by

emergency physicians affiliated to institutions in Spain were included; conference presentations

were excluded. For each article we recorded the following information: year of publication;

journal; the journal’s impact factor; type of article; affiliation of the first emergency physician

coauthor named and the Spanish autonomous community where that physician worked; that

emergency physician’s place in the list of authors, university affiliation, and main type of work;

the research topic; and collaboration or not with coauthors from other departments or facilities.

Results: A total of 913 titles were published from 2005 to 2009, 38% more than in the

previous 5 years (P=.10); 409 (43.2%) titles corresponded to original articles. The increases

represented an annual growth in productivity of 7.3% (P<.001). The mean impact factor of the journals publishing the articles was 3.06 in the 2000-to-2004 period but decreased to 2.48 in the later period (P<.001). Spanish emergency physicians continue to publish mainly in Spanish and in Spanish journals when they are first authors, most work in hospital emergency departments, and a university affiliation is rare. The number of collaborations increased in the second period (from 55.2% to 68.8%, P<.001), but coauthors from outside Spain were listed on only 20 articles (2.3%). The topics researched most often were infectious and cardiovascular diseases and the organization of emergency services. In the 2005-to-2009 period, Catalonia was the community that produced the largest number of titles (208, 23.9%), and the department at Hospital Clínic de Barcelona (98 titles, 12.4%) was the most productive in the hospital category; among out-of-hospital services, the leader was the emergency response service in Galicia (061-Galicia). Important changes were seen between the two periods with regard to the relative weight of productivity in some autonomous communities, hospital emergency departments, and out-of-hospital services. Conclusions: The absolute productivity of Spanish emergency department physicians continued to grow during the 5-year period from 2005 to 2009 in terms of number of articles published; however, the mean impact factor of the publishing journals was lower in the second 5-year period. We also detected subtle changes over time in the topics being studied by emergency physicians; the journals they chose; and the productivity of different communities, hospitals, and responder services.

Burillo-Putze G, Cremades Pallas RM, Julián Jiménez A, Martín-Sánchez FJ, Miró O, Valcárcel De La Iglesia MA