Saudi Arabian Top Four Medical journals Bibliometric study

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to measure the progress of scientific research outcomes of four medical journals, which are indexed to National Library of Medicine (USA) PubMed published from Saudi Arabia during the period from 2000 to 2019 Methods: Scientific papers that are published under the category of original and review articles, short communications, case, and short reports were downloaded from the top four medical journals indexed in the PubMed database viz. (i) Saudi Medical Journal (SMJ) (ii) Neurosciences (iii) Saudi Journal of Kidney Diseases and Transplantation (SJKDT) and (iv) The Annals of Saudi Medicine (ASM) and their research productivity is measured through an appropriate mapping process. The data were analyzed according to certain parameters such as the growth of publication, the types of publication, and the authorship pattern. Inferences: The findings of the study revealed that 12866 articles were contributed by 47346 authors with an average of 3.67 authors per article, and 47.92% articles were published in 12 issues of SMJ (n=6165(47.92%)) , Neuroscience (n=1422, 11.05%)), SJKDT (n=3160, 24.56%)and ASM (n=2119, 16.47%) during 2000–2019. Most of the articles (n=10774, 83.74%) included more than one author, leaving only 2092 articles (16.26%) were published by single authors. The authors have collaborated with national and international authors for their scholarly work. Conclusions: The analysis of bibliometric indicators of these four medical journals showed the rising tendency of research publications and the high rate of collaborative research output. These journals contributed a massive number of research papers during the period of the last twenty years. Collaboration among researchers facilitates sharing knowledge and techniques and brings a mixture of positive scientific thoughts. This study recommends that the unified bylaws for faculty in Saudi universities should give more weight to multi-authored papers