"Are we prophets only at home"? Do national otorhinolaryngologists cite papers by other Spanish ORL colleagues?
BACKGROUND
Over the last few years, the Acta Otorrinolaringológica Española (Acta ORL) has been working to improve its impact factor. A high citation rate in the Journals indexed at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) is needed to achieve this, particularly in the ones with a high impact factor. The objective of this study was to analyse the index of citation by other national research groups of the articles by Spanish otorhinolaryngologists published in the Acta ORL Esp.


METHODS
Retrospective descriptive-bibliometric study to analyse the publications and citations of original articles published in the Acta ORL between January 2004 and December 2008.


RESULTS
We observed that Spanish otolaryngologists had a low publication index in the Acta ORL, where only 39.1% of the Spanish biomedical production was published. Moreover, the original articles published in the Acta ORL had a low index (32%) of citation by other national authors or groups, displaying a strong self-citation tendency (18.9%).


CONCLUSIONS
National otorhinolaryngologists or ORL research groups had a low tendency to cite other national (ORL) authors in their publications. In addition, national authors had low biomedical production compared with their European peers. The biomedical production and the articles published in the Acta ORL had a low citation index by ISI indexed journals.
Servicio de Otorrinolaringología, Hospital Clínic, Barcelona, España. clangdon@clinic.ub.es
Cristóbal
C
Langdon
Isabel
I
Vilaseca
Rodrigo
R
Iñiguez-Cuadra
Manuel
M
Bernal-Sprekelsen
D001319:Authorship; D015706:Bibliometrics; D035843:Biomedical Research; D010036:Otolaryngology; D011643:Publishing / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D013030:Spain