Increased expenditure on Australian health and medical research and changes in numbers of publications determined using PubMed

Abstract

Objective: To determine temporal trends in PubMed publications for Australian authors compared with changes in funding for health and medical research (HMR). Design: Retrospective observational study. Setting: Internet‐based bibliometric study that collated Australian HMR expenditure from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and Australian (and other) research publications from PubMed. Main outcome measures: Australian expenditure on HMR and numbers of PubMed‐cited publications from 1980 to 2004, with subgroup analyses for universities, clinical trials, and genetic and biotechnology research, and comparison with similar results from the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Results: From 1980–81 to 2003–04, Australian HMR expenditure increased from $66 million to $1503 million and total Australian PubMed publications increased from 844 to 13 836. From 1995–96 to 2003–04, Australian publications for university‐derived research and for clinical trials increased at a fairly constant rate. Genetic and biotechnology publications increased about fivefold (49 to 277) between 1990–91 and 2003–04. Between 1990 and 2004, total publications increased from 1754 to 3288 for New Zealand and from 12 401 to 19 600 for the UK. Conclusions: There is an association between increased funding for HMR and increased publications, as determined using PubMed, in the past 10 years. Using PubMed may be a simple way to track output from HMR expenditure.

Tracking Australian health and medical research expenditure with a PubMed bibliometric method

“…This bibliometric analysis confirms the previously reported 7 association of increased Australian HMR expenditure leading to an increase in HMR publications from Australian authors indexed in PubMed. This evidence suggests that the 1998 Federal Government decision to almost double the annual NHMRC funding, 2 to become one of the highest in the world on a per capita basis, has delivered a sustained increase in the number of PubMed publications along with an increase in publication quality up to 2011/12.…”

“…There is no single query term to retrieve ‘Health and Medical Research’ publications from the database as the phrase/concept is not compatible with Medline MeSH terms. We have therefore refined our previous query 7 for Australian publications to retrieve all Australian HMR publications. Details of the refinement process and queries can be found in the supplementary file (available in the online version of this article).…”

“…In 2006, we published a method to track the association between Australian HMR expenditure and Australian HMR publications listed in PubMed and compared Australia's publication output to that of the United Kingdom (UK) and New Zealand (NZ) 7 . In this follow‐up study, we refine the method to ascertain whether the hypothesis holds after more than a decade of increased HMR funding and the publication of the 2013 HMR Report.…”

Erratum

“…This review is the first to provide a local summary of the principal contribution in surgical oncology research. Similar studies of Australia's research contribution have been published in other fields of medicine including ophthalmology 5, public health 6, 7, cardiovascular medicine 8, health informatics 9, and rural medicine 10.…”

Bibliometric assessment of cancer research in Puerto Rico, 1903-2005

“…Although PubMed is the most widely used biomedical system (54, 55), indexing more than 4 600 journals worldwide (56), not all of Puerto Rico’s research publications are indexed in it. Approximately 17% of the manually retrieved articles were not available in PubMed, as they had been published before the date when their journals of precedence were incorporated in that electronic database.…”