Keywords
Abstract
Objective: The presence of erroneous author and address information in scientific
articles is a great concern to bibliometricians studying research outputs. While it is
usual to find inconsistencies regarding the department, faculty, institution, or city
names, in articles from Palestine, an additional difficulty emerges due to the absence of
consensus on the country name. In the present study, we aimed at developing accurate
search strategies on PubMed to explore biomedical research productivity in Palestine.
Materials and Methods: We analyzed an existing query syntax for search for
Palestinian papers on PubMed, applied a series of additional search strategies, and
formulated a new search formula for Palestine.
Results: In 162 Palestinian biomedical citations published between 1987 and 2005, the
name of the country appeared in a number of polymorphs. Quantitatively, Palestine
produces far less than 0.5% of the total biomedical citations output in the Arab World.
Qualitatively, almost all Palestinian biomedical articles appeared in low impact factor
journals with very little exceptions.
Conclusion: War medicine is a well developed science in biomedicine in Palestine.
Most authors study aspects of sanitation and microbiology. Similarly, post-traumatic
disorders, including diabetes, are primary targets for research in the country.