Assessing oncological productivity: is one method sufficient?

This work analyses the distribution of oncological papers published in 1995 by authors from the European Union (EU) in any journal of all the Subject Categories of the Science Citation Index compiled by ISI (Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, USA) and is based on the country of origin of all of the contributors. The study compares the results with those of a previous study dealing with publications in journals of the ISI Oncology Category based on the country of origin of the corresponding author. The aim of the study was to compare two different methods used to evaluate research productivity in order to understand the extent to which the results are influenced by the methodology adopted. Data on the number of published papers for each country, ratio between the number of occurrences of papers and country population and gross domestic product (GDP), and mean Impact Factors (IF) were compared. While findings on the number of published papers (United Kingdom (UK), Germany and France ranking best), source country population (Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands ranking best) and gross domestic product (Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands ranking best) showed no important changes, the mean IF value result was, for some countries, very different from the previous study. In particular, while Germany, Belgium, Portugal and France fared well, Norway, Sweden, Austria and Spain showed poorer results. Some hypotheses are advanced, and care in the scientometric interpretation of data is urged. An analysis of the journals in which EU authors published their articles was also carried out and the main SCI categories to which the journals belong are reported. As was expected, many categories other than oncology were represented (biochemistry, haematology, pathology, etc.). (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.