Respiratory System

page 42

Lab Times

2-2011

Ranking

Publication Analysis 1998-2009 Publication Analysis 1998-2009

Respiratory System
England dominates European respiratory system research more clearly than most other biomedical disciplines. Most-cited topics are asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pulmonary hypertension.

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t’s not difficult to guess that research into therespiratory system is dominated by disease topics. This fact, however, immediately turns it into a rather broad field, the reason being that lung and airway diseases are probably more diverse than the diseases of any other human organ system. One of the consequences, therefore, is that apart from the “obvious” fields of pneumology, pulmology and internal medicine, quite a variety of other medicalfields are also attracted to lung research. The most obvious example, of course, is lung cancer, which certainly is a major research topic for many oncologists and pathologists. This fact, however, is actually nothing unusual since the same is true for more or less every organ system that can be affected by tumour development. In contrast, more specific variety is introduced to the field by twoother pre-dominating airway diseases: asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Among other factors (smoking, for example), one of the main underlying reasons for both of those malfunctions is the fact that the respiratory system interacts with our environment in a much more direct manner than the majority of other organs. Therefore, in the cases of asthma and COPD, considerablenumbers of researchers from epidemiology and public health, immunology and allergology, environmental and occupational medicine, social medicine and paediatrics also enter the “respiratory field”.

So, when it comes to a publication analysis of European respiratory research – shouldn’t it be a bit like comparing apples with oranges given this remarkable variety of disciplines involved? Wait and see!First of all, one “technical” point. Many of the “top papers” on respiratory research are, indeed, published in multidisciplinary journals like Nature, Science or The Lancet. Nevertheless, we had to restrict a certain part of the analysis to the 43 expert journals listed in the subject category “Respiratory System” of Thomson Reuter’s database Web of Science, which was used for this analysis. Thereason is that Web of Science doesn’t provide any sufficiently reliable tools to automatically extract relevant respiratory system articles from those multidisciplinary journals. Of course, as a result, some of the most prominent papers in the field have been omitted from the performance analysis of individual countries (see tables p. 37). Despite this limitation, however, we believe that asurvey, restricted to the specialist journals only, still provides sufficiently valid indicators for the countries’ overall productivity in respiratory system research. On the contrary, rankings of the most-cited researchers and papers (see tables, p. 38) could be analysed from publications in all journals.

However, this is still not the end of the line. So far, we still haven’t spoken about lung andairway infections, such as tuberculosis, which means we should also keep our eyes peeled for microbiologists, infectiologists and, once again, immunologists. And, of course, all the physiologists, biochemists, cell and molecular biologists, etc. who perform basic research into the function of the respiratory system also remain to be mentioned.

One system, much input

Given this directive,let’s have a look at how the publication performance in respiratory research during the period 1998-2009 is distributed among the individual European countries. The fact that England emerges as the “winner” in terms of number of articles and overall citations isn’t really unexpected. What is somewhat of a surprise, however, is just how wide the gap is to followers, Germany and France. Both those...