Romanian psychiatric literature: analysis of accessibility and nature of Romanian psychiatric articles.
BACKGROUND
Romania is a low-income country of 22 million people and, currently, information regarding mental health research is limited. Romania is one of the last countries in eastern Europe not to have its own bibliographic biomedical database.


OBJECTIVE
To assess the content and quality of Romanian psychiatric research activity over time.


METHODS
EMBASE (1980 to April 2008), MEDLINE (1950 to April 2008) and PsycINFO (1806 to April 2008) were systematically searched for psychiatric articles originating from Romania. The sample from PsycINFO was described.


RESULTS
PsycINFO was by far the best source of Romanian mental health literature with a considerable increase in the publication activity since 2000 (PsycINFO identified 3236 hits, MEDLINE 549, EMBASE 139). Most papers are in English, but a sizeable minority are in Romanian (30%), French (4%) or Hungarian (4%). The main topics of interest are cognitive processes, creativity, schizophrenia and cognitive development and stress and are, according to PsycINFO's indexing, 'empirical studies'. Seventeen randomised trials were identified with all studies after 2000 being sponsored by industry.


CONCLUSIONS
Surprisingly, and not in keeping with other studies of the literature of neighbouring countries, PsycINFO is the major source of psychiatric bibliographic records of this region. There are signs of a resurgence of research activity in Romania and as the number of local mental health workers increases we can expect more output. Industry is now funding evaluative studies in Romania. As everywhere, but perhaps more acutely in situations of severely limited research support, there is a difficult balance to be struck between benefiting support and losing independence.
Bucur
Mihaela
M
Sussex Partnership NHS UK-Linwood CMHS, Haywards Heath, UK.
Adams
Clive
C
D022126:Access to Information; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D011570:Psychiatry; D012383:Romania