Evaluating The Quality Of Papers On Drug Therapy For Myocardial Infarction

Background and ObjectiveThe quantity of scientific papers is often used to evaluate the achievement of a scientific research or a researcher, as a result, more and more papers of low quality appear when we put excessive attention to the quantity of papers. Thus it is important to evaluate the quality of scientific papers objectively and fairly. Now the methods often used to evaluate the quality of scientific papers include qualitative evaluation, such as peer review and core journal, and quantitative e-valuation, such as Impact Factor (IF) analysis and citation analysis. Peer review is often used to evaluate the quality of papers before they are published. The evaluation of peer review is expressed as words and lack of objective quantitative norm. Core journal has some limitations when it is used to evaluate the quality of papers. Quantitative evaluation is often used after papers are published. There is a debate on whether IF can be used to evaluate the quality of papers. Some people insist that the papers published in journals with high IF are superior to those published in journals with low IF, while others think IF is not objective and fair to evaluate the quality of papers. The theoretical basis of citation analysis is that the number of citation of a paper reflects the quality of the paper positively. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship both between the increase in the quantity of papers and the improvement of the quality of papers and between IF and the evaluation of the quality of papers.Materials and MethodsWe selected the published papers on the drug therapy for myocardial infarc-tion as the subject of citation analysis. Chinese Biomedical literature Analysis and Retrieval System for Compact Disc was used to retrieve the published papers and Chinese Medical Citation Index to perform citation analysis. We analyzed the number of published papers, cited papers, citations, self - citations, and citations each year, and summarized the journal that published the cited papers, especially the papers that were cited frequently. The correlations between the number of published papers and cited papers as well as between IF and the number of cited papers were determined by Spearman rank correlation.ResultsA total of 2452 papers on^myocardial infarction were published from 1994 to 2003, and 603 were cited. The number of citation was 2056, with 63 self - citations. The number of cited papers in the same year of publication accounted for less than 5% of the total number of published papers, and the number of citations in the same year of publication accounted for less than 10% of the total number of citations. The number of cited papers three years after publication was 20% - 30% of the total number of published papers, and the number of citations three years after publication was more than 40% of the total number of citations. The number of cited papers five years after publication was 5% -10% more than that of three years after publication, and the number of citations five years after publication was more than 65% of the total number of citations. All of the 603 cited papers were published in 176 journals and 51 papers that were cited frequently in 11 journals. Spearman rank correlation revealed no correlation between the number of published papers and cited papers ( P > 0. 05 ) and between IF and number of cited papers ( P > 0.05).ConclusionsThis study shows that the quality of papers on drug therapy for myocardial infarction does not increase with the number of published papers accordingly from 1994 through 2003. The number of citations can reflect the quality of pa-...