An Insight into the Research Performance of the Egyptian Faculties of Veterinary Medicine based on the Journal Impact Factor and Citation Counts

To assure quality in the higher education institutions, several factors should be considered. The most important factors are infrastructures, educational process and the research performance of the faculties. Research performance is measured by quantitative (publication productivity) and qualitative (journal impact factor and citation counts) indicators. My previous paper bibliometrically analyzed the productivity of the Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine published in PubMed between 2000 and 2014. The current bibliometric study was undertaken with three aims. First to analyze the journal impact factor (IF) and citation counts of publications from different Egyptian faculties of Veterinary medicine published on PubMed between 2000 and 2014. Second, to explore the correlations between citation counts and some factors (faculty oldness, total publications, publication oldness and journal IF), and to list the journals and there frequencies used by the academics in the studied faculties. Publications were collected from the PubMed. The IF was retrieved from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and the citation counts were obtained from the Goggle Scholar (GS). The analysis revealed that about 78% of the studies were published in journals with impact factor (0.296 ≤ IF ≤ 8.167) and only 12% were in journal with no impact factor (impact factor =0). The faculties of veterinary medicine in Egypt were ranked according to the IF as follow; Cairo on the top followed by Mansura, Zagazig, Assiut, Alexandria, Suez Canal, Beni-Suef, Benha, Kafr El-sheikh, South Valley, Sohag and Menoufia. About 83% of the publications were cited at least once and up to 273 times, and about 17% were never been cited. Based on the citation counts, Cairo had the highest citations, followed by Assiut, Mansura, Alexandria, Suez Canal, BeniSuef, Kafr El-Sheikh, Benha, Zagazig, Menoufia, Damanhour, South Valley and Sohag. Citation counts showed strong positive correlations with both faculty oldness and total publications, but week correlations with both publication oldness and journal IF. Ranking of different faculties could initiate a positive competition


INTRODUCTION
University is the most important social place for the promotion of ideas and intellects. 1 Infrastructure, educational process and research performance are three quality assurance measures for universities. 2Bibliometric indices offer a relatively fair way to compare the scientific outputs between universities and/or researchers in the same or different countries. 3,4bliometric analyses the academic publications by counting the total output during a specific time and measuring the research importance and impact in a specific discipline. 5ournal impact factors (IF) and citation counts are two main bibliometric indicators that commonly used to assess the quality of research outputs in the higher education sector worldwide. 6The IF reflects the average number of citations to articles published in a journal after two years. 7he higher IF of a journal indicates its scientific importance in a specific discipline. 8For instance, some journals such as Nature and Science are considered as high-quality journals because each has a high IF.The IF of different journals can be accessed from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) of Thomson Reuters, which is published in a report delivered through the internet at June every year for the previous year.
Citation analysis is a branch of information science based on citation counts.It is defined as the number of times a publication has been accessed and referenced by others scholars.The citation count is another indicator of the research quality and scientist importance. 9,10It is assumed that a high citation count for an article indicates it has been the subject of discussion or criticism in its discipline.There are many websites can be used to calculate the citation of publications such as ISI, Scopus, web of science (WoS), Google Scholar (GS) and others.The GS autonomously extracts significantly higher citation counts than other sites. 11ypt has 23   2013).The Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine produced 710 articles published in PubMedindexed Journals. 12The current study was undertaken with three main aims.First, to analyze the journal IF and citation counts of PubMed-indexed publications produced by academic departments related to the Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine during the period between 2000 and 2014.Second, to investigate the correlations between citation counts and faculty oldness, total publications, publication oldness and journal IF of these publications.Third, to list the journals of these publications.To my best knowledge this is the first bibliometric study analyzing the IF and citation counts of publications from the Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine.This detailed analysis will shed light on the findings of the comparisons of the Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine and could be a useful baseline of ranking of these faculties.

METHODOLOGY
Scientometric online database method of analysis was applied for the current study.The bibliographic sources used for the analysis were the PubMed, GS and ISI.

Data Collection
Publications of the Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine on PubMed during 2000-2014 has been collected and analyzed with Excel 2013 as previously published. [12]The total publications for each faculty were calculated and the titles of publications were used for further IF and citation count analyses as described below.

Journal IF Analysis
The 2013 IF for each journal analyzed in the current study was retrieved from the Thomson ISI report published in 2014.The IF of the journals were grouped into nonimpacted (IF=0) and impacted (IF > 0) categories.Furthermore, the impacted journals were scored into low (IF < 2), medium (2 ≤ IF < 4), high (4 ≤ IF < 6), very high (6 ≤ IF < 8), and extremely high (IF ≥ 8) to make the comparative bibliometric analysis easier.The total IF as a number and percentage was calculated for all faculties together and for each faculty in a separate.Furthermore, the total IF of each faculty was normalized to its total publications to calculate and compare means.The maximum and minimum IF for each faculty was calculated.Frequencies of each IF score was determined for the total faculties together and for each individual faculty as a number and percentage to the total publications of such faculty.

Citation analysis
The GS was searched for citations to the 710 publications of the Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine on the Pub-Med during 2000-2014.The citation counts were collected within 2 days in August 2015.Simply, the title of the paper was entered in the search box of the GS and on clicking, it would contain a "cited by" link before a number that indicate the citation counts for this article.Total citation counts, mean (average number of citations per publications) ± standard error (SE), minimum and maximum citations were calculated for each faculty in Excel 2013.The citation counts were grouped into grades of citations; 0, 1-10 11-50, 51-100, 101-150, 151-200 and 201-300, and frequency as a number and percentage of each grade was estimated.

Journal Core Analysis
The journals containing the 710 papers related to the Egyptian faculties if veterinary medicine were listed and the publication frequency of each journal was calculated.

Statistical Analysis
Statistical analyses were performed using Excel 2013.The descriptive statistics were analyzed and the mean, standard error (SE), minimum and maximum were determined.The correlation analysis was performed to determine the significant relationship between the citation counts and oldness of the faculty, total publications, oldness of publications and IF.The correlation coefficient (r) was an indicator for the correlation.The correlation was considered perfect positive if r=1 or perfect negative if r= −1.

Journal IF Analysis
Among the 710 total publications produced by the Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine and published in PubMedindexed journals between 2000 and 2014, 559 papers (78.3%) were published in journals with IF more than 0, while 151 papers (21.7%) were published in non-impacted journals (IF=0).Most (328, 46.2%) of publications were in journals with low IF, and 215 (30.3%) were published in journals with middle IF, however a few publications; 13 (1.8%), 2 (0.3%) and 1 (0.1%), went to journals with high, very high and extremely high IF, respectively (Figure 1).The calculated total IF for the journals in which the papers were published was 1083.The lowest IF journal (0.296) was related to publications from Cairo and the highest IF journal (8.167) was seen in a publication from Mansura.The descriptive statistics of the IF were presented in Table 1.
The IF-scaled analysis showed that most of the papers from different faculties were published in low and middle IF journals but only 1 paper in a very high and 1 paper in an extremely high IF journals.

Factors Affecting the Citation Counts
To study factors that may increase the citation counts and further visibility of publications.The relations between citation counts and the faculty oldness, total publications,

DISCUSSION
Bibliometric indicators attempt to measure the academic research quality of scientific institutions. 13The IF and citation counts are two main indicators of the research    It was found that a positive correlation between the four studied factors and the citation counts with different degrees as follow: strong linear relations with both the oldness of the faculties; r= 0.0.841(Figure 5) and the total publications; r= 0.9924 (Figure 6), but a week linear relations with the oldness of the publications; r= 0.1859 (Figure 7) and Journal IF, r= 0.1521 (Figure 8).The IF is known as a quantitative measurement of the journal performance thus, the higher IF journals attract most of researchers. 14,15Many countries are giving reward for their scientists if they could publish in journals with high IF such as Nature, Science, and Cell, 16 although, there are many droughts about the using of IF as an indicator for evaluating the research quality. 17,18 the other hand, the citation count analysis for evaluation and comparison of the research performance of individual researchers, departments, and research institutions is widely used. 19,20Citation count ranking could be used to evaluate the scientific institution within the same country. 21Citation count-based ranking of the Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine was as follows: Cairo was on the top followed by Assiut, Mansura, Alexandria, Suez Canal, Beni-Suef, Kafr El-Sheikh, Benha, Zagazig, Menoufia, Damanhour, South Valley and Sohag.Citation counts of most publication from different faculties were low (1-10) and only one publication from Cairo were cited more than 200 times reflecting the low effect of publications from the faculty of veterinary medicine in Egypt on their international field of studies.

Journal List of Publications
There were many factors affecting the citation counts as shown in this study.First, it was found a strong positive correlation between citations and faculty oldness.The older faculties like Cairo (1954) and Assiut (1958) known to have older staff with much research experiences.However, younger researchers are likely to have less scientific experiences as they are not involved for many years in research. 22Second, with an agreement with an earlier study, the current study showed that there is a strong      positive correlation between the citations and publication counts. 21Third, there was a weak correlation between the citations and publication oldness.The more important publications are usually cited even its publication date is more recent than others and that is revealing the importance of citation counts as indicator of research quality.Fourth, a weak positive correlation between the citations and journal was recorded in this study, supporting a previous study. 23e current study revealed that the 710 publications of the faculties of veterinary medicine 12 were published in 178 journals and only 4.4% of them were related to veterinary sciences while the majority (95.6%) were sent to non-veterinary science journals.That could be understandable when it is known that there are overlapping between many subjects in veterinary medicine with medicine and science. 24r findings could provide some references to veterinary science authorities on the quality of research came out from academics in their faculties.That may promote a positive completion between different faculties toward publication quality behind quantity.Furth more, it could be a guide for funding process of some faculties applying for scientific projects.The journal titles within and outside the veterinary medicine lists in the current study may be used as a database guidance for researchers from different faculties of veterinary medicine.The findings of the present study should serve as a starting point for deep consideration toward improvement in the research field of the faculties of veterinary medicine in Egypt.Thus, it is necessary to do yearly top-down research evaluation of the different Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine for a needed taking decisions about short and long-term research strategies.

CONCLUSION
Overall, bibliometric studies such as the current study is needed to describe the performance and impact of the veterinary medical research in Egypt and to compare the research output of the Egyptian faculties of veterinary-Medicine.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author thanks, Dr. Yasser A. Ahmed, Assistant Professor and Department Head of Histology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, South Valley University for his scientific help in explaining medical and veterinary medical terminologies related to the study.
The 710 papers produced by the Egyptian faculties if veterinary medicine during 2000-2014 were published in 178 Pub-Med indexed journals.Only 31 (4.4%) of them were veterinary medical journals.Most frequent journal was the "J Egypt Soc Parasitol" which contained 22 academic papers from the studied faculties.Table5list all of these journals with their frequency of use by the academics of different faculties.

Figure 3 :
Figure 3: Citation % Frequency.Figure 4: Contributions % of faculties to the total citation counts.

Figure 4 :
Figure 3: Citation % Frequency.Figure 4: Contributions % of faculties to the total citation counts.

Figure 5 :
Figure 5: Correlation between citation counts and oldness of the faculties.
and importance.The IF is a measure of the average number of citations to recent articles published in journals within a particular period.Citation count is the times of a publication mentions in other studies.Veterinary research is an important field in Egypt and the development of studies in veterinary medicine will positively affect the developing economy of Egyptians.Information science is concerning with the ranking of scientific institutions based on research quality.The current study aimed to measure the quality of the 710 research articles produced by the Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine published in Pub-Med indexed journals between 2000 and 2014 12 by using the IF and citation count analyses.The current study revealed that 21.7% of these publications were in non-impacted journals and 78.3% were in Journal with IF ranged from 0.296 to 8.167.The majority of the publications were in Journal with low IF and seldom in high or extremely high IF journals.Cairo had the top-cumulative IF followed by Mansura, Zagazig, Assiut, Alexandria, Suez Canal, Beni-Suef, Benha, Kafr El-sheikh, South Valley, Sohag and Menoufia.

Figure 6 :
Figure 6: Correlation between citation counts and total publications.

Figure 8 :
Figure 8: Correlation between citation counts and IF.
public universities and 15 of them include faculties of veterinary medicine.The faculties of veterinary medicine in Egypt from the oldest to the newest are Cairo

Table 1 : Journal IF descriptive statistics Faculty Total IF Contribution (%) to the total IF Mean ± SE Minimum Maximum
, Suez Canal (9.8), Damanhour (5.2), Sohag (4.3) and South Valley (1.6) as shown in table3.Frequency analysis of citation of different scales was presented in Table4.Table4indicated low citation counts for most of the Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine.It was noticed that most of the cited papers from each faculty were located the grade 1-10 citations and only one paper from Cairo was cited more than 200 times.

Table 3 : Citation counts descriptive statistics Faculty Total citations % Mean ± SD Min Max
publication oldness and journal IF were further analyzed.