title: Productivity in medical education research: an examination of countries of origin.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Productivity and countries of origin of publications within the field of medical education research have not been explored. Using bibliometric techniques we conducted an analysis of studies evaluating medical education interventions, examining the country where research originated as well as networks of authors within countries identified as 'most productive'.
  
  
  METHODS
  PubMed was used to search for evaluative studies of medical education. We then examined relative productivity of countries with >100 publications in our sample (number of publications/number of medical schools in country). Author networks from the top 2 countries with the highest relative productivity were constructed.
  
  
  RESULTS
  6874 publications from 18,883 different authors were included. The countries with the highest relative publication productivity were Canada (37.1), Netherlands (28.3), New Zealand (27), the UK (23), and the U.S.A (17.1). Author collaboration networks differed in both numbers of authors and intensity of collaborations in the countries with highest relative productivity.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In terms of the number of publications of evaluative studies in medical education, Canada.
authors.forename: Asif
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Doja
authors.forename: Tanya
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Horsley
authors.forename: Margaret
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sampson
mesh_terms: D015706:Bibliometrics; D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D002170:Canada; D004501:Education, Medical; D004526:Efficiency; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006801:Humans; D038622:Internationality; D009426:Netherlands; D009520:New Zealand; D011642:Publications / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011786:Quality Control; D014481:United States