Academic Productivity in Ophthalmology and Its Correlation to National Economic Indicators Among the OECD Countries: A Bibliometric Analysis

ABSTRACT

Purpose

Prompted by the clinical concern that limited healthcare resources allocation affects physicians’ research productivity, this study examines the association between bibliometric indices of ophthalmologic research and national economic indicators in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Methods

The Scimago Journal and Country rank source was searched for research productivity data in ophthalmology among OECD countries between 1996 and 2019. Bibliometric indices included: documents number, number and percent of citable documents, citations number, citations per document, and H-index. The updated economic indicators of each country (gross domestic product [GDP] per capita, health spending as percent of GDP (health expenditure), gross domestic expenditure on research, and development as percent of GDP [GERD]) were collected from the World Bank and the OECD websites. Correlation between economic and bibliometric metrics and multivariate linear regression analyses were performed.

Results

Among 267,444 documents analyzed, correlation analysis found a strong correlation between health expenditure and H index (r = 0.711, p < 0.001); a moderate correlation between health expenditure and documents number (r = 0.589, p < 0.001), number of citable document (r = 0.593, p < 0.001) and citations number (r = 0.673, p < 0.001); and a moderate correlation between GERD and H index (r = 0.564, p < 0.001). Multivariate regression analysis controlling for economic factors, population and language showed the independent association of these parameters with bibliometric indices.

Conclusions

This study demonstrates a positive correlation between bibliometric indicators of ophthalmology research and economic factors, particularly health expenditure, among the OECD countries. Our results suggest an advantage of domestic investment in health to expand academic productivity in the field of ophthalmology.

KEYWORDS:

• Bibliometrics
• ophthalmology research
• OECD
• H index
• health expenditure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Statement

All authors hereby state that this submission has not been published anywhere previously and that it is not simultaneously being considered for any other publication.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09286586.2024.2343728.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.