Landscape of Biomedical and Health Research in the Eastern Mediterranean: A 15-Year Analysis (Preprint)

Abstract

Research mapping relies on bibliometric analyses to estimate and analyze research productivity of an institution, country or region, in general, or investigate a specific domain of research. Bibliometric methods offer the advantage of using data from bibliographic databases with minimal bias or involvement from the researchers themselves. Numerous bibliometric analyses have taken place in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) to assess the publication situation either at a national scale or with a disease-specific focus. Yet, there are not enough data to establish a national/regional health research agenda.

To assess biomedical and health research outputs over two decades in all EMR countries for the years 2004-2018. To measure their year-to-year alignment with the regional strategic health priority areas identified by the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean (WHO-EMRO); namely, Health System Strengthening (HSS), Maternal and Child Health (MCH), Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD), Communicable Diseases (CD), and Emergency Preparedness and Response (EPR).

The number of biomedical and health articles originating from EMR each country of the EMR for the study period, as obtained from the PubMed search, was used as an indicator of a country’s total biomedical research production level. Data were weighted to take into account global research output, represented by the total number of articles indexed in PubMed per year, and the population size of each country.

By inspecting the overall raw data for biomedical research productivity in the EMR, a clear increasing trend is observed. Notably, five most-performing countries contributed to nearly 82% of all published biomedical research during 2004-2018, namely Iran (43%), followed by Egypt (14%), Saudi Arabia (11%), Pakistan (8%), and Tunisia (6%). According to the World Bank Group's economic classification, most of the performing countries in the EMR belong to the lower- and upper-middle income categories. All other remaining EMR countries had contributions of less than 4% of the overall biomedical research publications during the study period.

While data collected in this study offer a modest view of the social organization in the EMR through patterns of co-authorship and research collaborations, it is important to develop robust methodologies to be able to investigate this important aspect in more detail in the future.