Three Decades of Anesthesiology Research at King Fahd Hospital of the University: Bibliometric Analysis of Volume and Visibility

Context: The quantity and quality of publications by an institution is an indicator of its contribution towards the development of science. Aims: To examine the volume and visibility of publications by the anesthesia department of King Fahd Hospital of the University (KFHU), Dammam, Saudi Arabia, in the last 30 years. Settings and Design: Publications by members of the anesthesia department in the last three decades were retrieved from the databases of PubMed and Scopus. Materials and Methods: For each article retrieved, the journal and time of publication, the type of the article and the authors were analyzed. The visibility of KFHU publications in leading anesthesia journals is related to the number of citations each article received. Since websites publish only citation reports for the years 1999 to 2011, we analyzed visibility for the years 1998 to 2008. The visibility was compared to the general Saudi anesthesia publications and those of some other Arab countries. It was also related to global indices. Statistical Analysis Used: Two visibility indices were used in the present study. The first relates the average citations per articles in the years following publication to the average global citations per anesthesia articles. The second relates the average citations per article in the 3 years following publication to the impact of the journal of publication. The h-index was used as a measure of both volume and visibility. Results: Anesthesiologists from KFHU published 151 documents in the years 1983-2013, with a marked increase in the last 6 years. The articles published from the year 1998-2008 received citations similar to the journals where it was published with visibility index of one. The average citations per article were 11.75 which are close to the global anesthesia citations per article (12.2). Conclusions: KFHU anesthesia publications have increased recently. Its impact and visibility are similar to global indices.