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Neurology India, Vol. 58, No. 3, May-June, 2010, pp. 503-504 Correspondence Citation rates of pediatric oncology publications from India Ramandeep S Arora Specialist Registrar, Department of Pediatrics, Royal Bolton Hospital, Bolton, United Kingdom Date of Acceptance: 17-Jun-2010 Code Number: ni10135 PMID: 20644299 Sir, I would like to commend Bala et al., for their effort on analyzing the research output from India from 1999 to 2008 in the field of neurosciences. [1] The use of the Scopus database as a source of citations, and of h-index as a measure of productivity is preferable. The geographic and language bias of citation tracking in Web of Science makes it less suitable for analysis of research from India. [2] More detail in the methods section as to how the individual articles were identified by country, by the field of neurosciences, and as to whether they were collaborative papers would have been desirable. The essence of their findings is that India's share of the global publications in the field of neurosciences is increasing with time, along with an increase in the proportion of international collaborative papers. However, the total contribution from India as well as the rate of improvement lags behind Brazil, China, and South Korea. Additionally, average citations per publication (ACP) for Indian research are less than that of the 3 countries mentioned above. I would like to further explore this last observation of low ACP using published pediatric oncology literature from India as an example. Three hundred and ten publications in pediatric oncology from India for the years 2001 to 2005 were identified from Pubmed using the keywords "child" and its derivatives, "cancer" and its derivatives, and "India." These were from 67 institutes and published in 113 journals. Of the 310 publications, 35% were in journals of Indian origin. The most common type of publication was a single case report (53%) and 1469 citations to these 310 publications (ACP 4.7, range 0-39) were identified from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar during October 2009. Univariate analysis showed that ACP varied significantly by institute, journal, type of cancer, and type of study [Table - 1]. All these factors remained statistically significant on multivariate analysis although the strength of the association of institute with ACP became weaker. These observations suggest that publications in local (Indian in this case) journals and publishing single case reports were linked with low ACP in published pediatric oncology literature. If we extend this argument to the observations of Bala et al[1] it could provide one explanation for the low ACP of the published neurosciences research from India. It would be useful to compare the various descriptive variables for publications in neuroscience research from India, Brazil, China, and South Korea to verify the above hypothesis. References
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