Dækningsgraden i Science Citation Index af dansk sundhedsvidenskabelig forskning i 1998

Introduction: Our objective was to investigate the coverage of Danish health sciences research in the Science Citation Index (SCI) on both the journal and article levels. In addition, we estimated the coverage of country-based analyses for the domain-specific databases MEDLINE and EMBASE. Further, international collaboration in the health sciences during 1998 was analysed. Materials and methods: The annual research reports in electronic form from the university faculties of the health sciences of the University of South Denmark, Aarhus University, Copenhagen University, and the H:S region covering 1998 were analysed by means of a variety of algorithms in order to isolate unique journals and journal articles. The resulting list of journals was compared to the list of health scientific journals indexed by SCI for 1998. From the same SCI list, all the articles having at least one Danish author were extracted. These articles were then used to assess the coverage by MEDLINE and EMBASE. The study of international collaboration with Danish authors utilized the same material. Results: The SCI coverage was approximately 90% for internationally published Danish health sciences research. That figure dropped to 72% for all research articles published by the institutions under study. The SCI coverage was approximately 75% at the journal level. Ugeskrift for Læger published a substantial portion of the remaining articles. The coverage in MEDLINE and EMBASE using national affiliations was estimated to be 78%. Discussion: The SCI is well suited as a tool for citation and publication analyses of Danish health research published in international journals. Due to the scientific quality of the subject indexing in MEDLINE and EMBASE, these databases offer a more satisfying picture of the publication behaviour in the various disciplines than does the SCI.