Bibliometric Analysis of Research Productivity of Health Care Professionals in Saudi Arabia: An Exploratory Study

Objectives: The aim of this study is to analyze research productivity through literature mapping of Health care Professionals (HCPs) belonging to Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal university (IAU), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). To facilitate that, publications made by the HCPs in those journals indexed in the PubMed indexed medical database have been chosen for this study. The selected study period was between 2014 and 2018. This study also explores the literature growth, mapping of the health care literature and health care professional’s collaboration patterns in KSA. Methods: The chosen data were downloaded from PubMed Database through Endnote software. Publications are filtered to countries based on the affiliation. The following search terms have been used to yield the records from database on 10th April 2019, “(((((saudi[Affiliation] OR saudiarabia[Affiliation]) OR KSA[Affiliation]) OR K.S.A[Affiliation]) OR K.S.A.[Affiliation]) OR kingdom of saudi arabia[Affiliation]) AND ( 2014/01/01 [PDAT] : 2018/12/31 [PDAT])))))“. Result: It revealed that 33872 papers have been published with specific on health care literature during the study period. Among the published papers, 26.52% (N=8983) of them belonging to the year 2018 whereas 75% of the articles were published in a rest of the years. The journal “PLoS One” was the most productive Journal, with 680 of publication were produced during 2014-18, followed by Saudi Med J (N=619), Sci Rep (N=612), Saudi J Biol Sci (N=412). In terms of collaboration, 59.05% (N=20001) of the articles were published with more than five authors, demonstrating a high range of collaboration among the Saudi Arabian health professionals. Conclusion: This study concludes that there is a progressive growth in the number of publications as well as research collaborations among Saudi healthcare professionals