Bibliometric analysis as mesaure of long-term performance in pancreatic cancer research

Introduction: Research on pancreatic cancer consists in basic, translational and clinical research. Bibliometric indexes as IF and H-Index have been proposed as measures of quality and performance for medical research. Our goal was to analyze the IF and the 5-years H-Index of the publications about pancreatic cancer research. Methods: A literature search was performed on PubMed from 2003 to 2013 including the first five journals with the highest Impact Factor from each of the following subject categories: Surgery, Oncology, Gastroenterology, Research and Experimental Medicine, General and Internal Medicine and Pathology. An overall number of 2774 publications were screened, and 358 original papers were included in the analysis. 126 (35%) articles were published in clinical research, 105 (29%) in translational, and 127 (36%) in basic research. Results: The average IF was 6.68 for clinical papers, 10.07 for translational, and 8.53 for basic research, respectively (p < 0.0001). IF significantly correlated with the department of affiliation and the geographic area (p < 0.0001 and < 0.0001, respectively). Translational research had lower chance than clinical and basic research to be published in low IF journals (OR: 0.105; 95% CI 0.035–0.313 p < 0.001). However, the difference in 5-years HI was not statistically significant. Conclusion: Translational research may have better chance to publish in high IF journals. However long term performance might not be mainly influenced by the journal IF. Long-term performance may be affected by research findings that are reproducible, resolve gaps arise between theoretical expectation and results or changing current clinical practice.