Study Of Index Medicus Included Biomedical Journals In China And Factor Analysis Of The Inclusion

BACKGROUND. By the end of 20^th century, China has been producing a big portion of world total scholarly journals. Their overall quality and impact, however, remains at low level among international journals. With the globalization and China's entrance into WTO, it has been the intrinsic requirement for journals in China to meet the high standard, which is also driven by the market-oriented economy. Journals'internationalization includes 10 aspects, internationalization of editorial board, being included by world's recognized citation index institutes, language varieties, and so on. Biomedicine is the leading discipline among natural sciences in the 21st century. In accordance with that, biomedical journals have demonstrated the largest quantity and fast-growing speed among the scholarly journals in natural sciences. Index Medicus (IM) and it's online database, published by United States National Library of Medicine, is recognized worldwide as the premier source for bibliographic and abstract coverage of biomedical literature. By 2006, IM has included 4,965 biomedical journals in 85 countries, with 97 of them in China, far less than that in US, UK or Japanese. It's generally believed that the evaluating indices of IM-included journals, e.g., total cited frequency and impact factors, are better than that of others. However, there is a lack of data supporting this claim. The thesis studied on the indices, used by Chinese Journal Citation Report (CJCR), between the journals which were included by IM and those not included to find out their differences in quality. Furthermore, more factors that could influence the inclusion were explored in this thesis, in hope for providing data and information that could be helpful for the biomedical journals in China in their endeavor to be included by IM.METHODS: Journals were selected randomly. Evaluation indices were selected from CJCR, i.e., total cited frequency, impact factor (IF), citing journal number, immediacy index, non-self cited rate, cited half-life, mean citation rate, average number of authors per paper, regional and institutional distribution, ratio of international papers and ratio of funding papers. All the data were then imported into Microsoft Excel and SPSS (ver12.0) to perform statistical analysis (Mann-Whitney U test, t test and paired t test).RESULTS: In the range of Chinese Medicine journals, no significant difference was found in IF across years; total cited frequency was found different between specific two years; ratio of funding papers was different between every two years. In IM included journals which were sponsored by medical universities, only mean citation rate showed difference across years. However, comparison of indices of the 13 biomedical journals in China before and after their inclusion by IM, significant difference was observed in all indices except for cited half-life,non-self cited rate and ratio of international papers.CONCLUSION: CJCR is a unique evaluating tool designed specifically for Chinese scholarly journals. It produces new local indices as well as adopting JCR's traditional ones. It is, therefore, objective to obtain the results as the statistical source. Based on the study, we can come to the conclusion: the overall quality of biomedical journals basically shows no difference regardless their inclusion or not by IM, while for individual journals, it has an extremely vital role of IM-inclusion to the development of biomedicine journals. Inclusion of journals is correlated with their working language, the sponsors and other factors.