Contributions of Egyptian Faculties of Veterinary Medicine Indexed In PubMed between 2000 and 2014 : A Comparative Bibliometric Analysis

The current study aimed to quantitatively analyze and compare the research publications productivity of the Egyptian faculties of Veterinary Medicine published between 2000 and 2014 in PubMed-indexed journals. According to their contributions to the total productivity, the 15 Egyptian faculties were ranked as follow; Cairo on the top followed by Assiut, Mansura, Zagazig, Alexandria, Benha, Suez Canal, Beni-Suef, Kafr El-Sheikh, South Valley, Damanhur, Sohag and Aswan. Cairo, Assiut and Mansura produced more than 52% of total publications, while Aswan and Sohag had no publication contribution during the study period. The productivity of most faculties showed a fluctuation pattern (no specific pattern of an increase or decrease), however when the study years were grouped into periods of 5 years each, it was found that most of the faculties presented a progressive increase during the periods 2000-2004, 2005-2009 and 2010-2014. Most faculties have their publications with first author affiliated to them. Authorship pattern analysis revealed that the multiple authorship trends were dominated over the single ones. Multiple-authored papers had two, three, four, five or more contributors. Department’s contributions were relatively diverse from faculty to another. The future study will focus on the qualitative analysis of the PubMed publications of these faculties.


Introduction
Egypt is a Middle East and Arab-African country with about 90 million populations; most of them live on the sides of the Nile River.Veterinary Medicine research is mostly related to basic and clinical sciences of domestic animals, birds and fish.Veterinary sciences help human health through the monitoring and control of zoonotic disease transmitted from animals to humans.Egypt has 23 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 (1954), Assiut (1961), Zagazig (1969), Alexandria (1974), Benha (1981), Beni-Suef (1982), Suez Canal (1985), Kafr El-Sheikh (1985), publications produced by authors affiliated to the different Egyptian Faculties of Veterinary Medicine.

Method
PubMed database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) was searched within a single-hour limit on May 4, 2015.The search words were faculty of Veterinary Medicine and either Cairo, Assiut, Zagazig, Mansura, Alexandria, Benha, Suez Canal, Beni-Suef, Kafr El-Sheikh, South Valley, Damanhur, Sohag, Aswan or Minia University.Articles came out from PubMed search was exported into the author E-mail and printed out for hand searching and further analysis.Further confirmation of the Faculty affiliation was done by checking the address of authors of each article.All articles were reviewed one by one and papers not related to faculties of Veterinary medicine of Egyptian Universities or those published before 2000 or after 2014 were excluded.The total publications of Egyptian faculties of Veterinary medicine on PubMed were calculated in 15 years (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014) and then the publications from different faculties were analyzed and compared on the bases of the following:  Year wise PubMed publication distribution. First authorship trend. Authorship pattern.
 Proportion of single-authored papers against multi-authored ones. Degree of collaboration in veterinary research.Degree of author collaboration from different faculties were determined in quantitative terms by using the formula given by another study (Subramanyam 1983).The formula is C = N M /N S +N M .C = Degree of collaboration, N M = Number of multi-authored papers and N S = Number of singleauthored papers. Department's contribution to the total publication output of each Faculty.Although some articles have no department affiliation, I made an effort to identify the department of the authors through their personal faculty pages and Google Scholar website.

Results
The PubMed search for publications affiliated to the Egyptian faculties of Veterinary Medicine revealed that the total productions between 2000 and 2014 were 712 articles.Only 14% of these publications (100/712) were produced in the period 2000 -2004, which

Faculty Contributions in PubMed Publications
Egyptian faculties of Veterinary Medicine were ranked according to their total PubMed publications.

Year wise distribution of Faculty publications
The yearly changes of publication productivity from the studied faculties showed the presence of a fluctuations pattern; no specific patterns of increases or declines were found (Fig. 2).2005-2009 versus 2000-2004 (comparison 1), 2010-2014 versus 2004-2009 (comparison 2) and 2010-2014 versus 2000-2004 (comparison 3).It was shown that the publication number from most faculties showed different rates of increases in the mentioned period comparisons, however, Suez Canal and Sohag showed a decline in the comparison 1 (Table 2).

Authorship patterns
The Number of authors of each publication was counted and the percentage of each category was calculated.Number of authors in publications was different from single, two, three, four, five or more than five authors with different frequency in studied faculties.Single-authored papers was most frequent in publications related to Damanhour (20%), two-authored papers was the highest in Alexandria (30.6%), three-authored papers was mostly produced by Assiut (31.1%) after Sohag (33.3), four-authored papers showed the highest percentage in publications from Cairo (26.2%), five-authored papers were highest in

Degree of author collaboration
The finding of this study revealed that there are more papers by multi-authors than by singles, thus the collaborative research has been preferred by the scientists over that of solitary research.Degrees of collaboration were high and ranged between 0.8 and 1.0.The degrees of collaboration in publications calculated for different faculties were recorded in Table 3.

Department contributions in faculty publications
Categorization of department was conducted according to the consultation of subject expert and arranged in Table 4.It is observed that the publications related to the faculties of veterinary medicine in Egypt covered some but not all faculty departments.The departments contributed with different proportions in publications related to each faculty (

Discussion
Bibliometric analysis is an important indicator for quantification of the scientific institution performance and ranking.The current study was carried out to do a bibliometric comparative assessment of the scientific contributions of the Egyptian faculties of Veterinary Medicine published in PubMed-indexed Journal in the period between 2000 and 2014.The PubMed database was chosen due to it is the simplest and most powerful free tool for retrieval of biomedical publications (Tadmouri and Tadmouri 2002;Falagas et al. 2008).
The study revealed that the total PubMed-indexed publications from the Egyptian faculties of Veterinary Medicine were 712 papers.This number is relatively low when compared to the research from the faculties of Medicine in Egypt.Mansura Faculty of Medicine, for example, produced about 1765 PubMed-indexed paper during 2012 and earlier.It is may be acceptable that the accurate number of the total Egyptian publications from the faculties of Veterinary Medicine is more than 712, as many researchers publish in non-PubMed-indexed local Journals and some of them may have only printable form with no an internet access.More than 60% of biomedical research in Africa are published in local non-indexed Journal (Gaillard 1992).The current study showed that in the period 2000-2004, Veterinary Medical research output from the Egyptian faculties was 100 papers increased to 168 in the period 2005-2009 and reached 444 papers in the period 2010-2014.In previous bibliometric studies, it was found that the total biomedical publication output affiliated to Egypt and indexed in PubMed was 16835 papers between 1991 and 2010 (Zeeneldin et al. 2012) and 1180between 2001and 2005(Benamer and Bakoush 2009).Furthermore, Egypt contribution to the world's biomedical publications increased from 0.09% in 1996 to 0.14% in 2006 (Afifi 2007).The current study found that Cairo had the largest number of publications, followed by Assiut, Mansura, Zagazig, Alexandria, Beni Suef, Suez Canal, Kafr El-Sheikh, South Valley, Damanhour, Sohag and Menoufia faculties of Veterinary Medicine, while Aswan and Minia had no publications on PubMed between 2000 and 2014.That is not surprising; at least for the most of the faculties, ranking according to their total publications was correlated to the old -year of establishment.Earlier established faculties are supposed to have a better scientific environment and infrastructure along with a large number of academic staffs producing relatively more publications than recently established faculties.Mansura (ranked the 3 rd in publication criteria) was out of this expectation, as it is relatively recent to other faculties came later in publication-based ranking.This ranking of faculties of Veterinary Medicine in Egypt according to their PubMed publications doesn't mean the same for the quality of the research (impact or importance).
Although, there was a fluctuation pattern of productivity between 2000 and 2041, most of the faculty showed an increase in the publication output in the period 2010-2014 comparing to periods 2000-2004 and 2005-2009.Multiple-authored scientific productivity is a common characteristic feature of applied sciences (Kasa et al. 2014) and one of its advantage is the increased citations of articles (Persson et al. 2004).The degree of collaboration was high in different faculties and ranged from 0.80 to 1.00.That indicate dominance tendency toward scientific collaboration between researchers affiliated to faculties of Veterinary Medicine in Egypt.It is known that collaborative research support exchanges of the knowledge and improve the publications (Ahmad et al. 2012).Department analysis showed a better research production in some department than other, where some departments had no representation in PubMed-indexed publications.It is a common phenomenon that some departments are more active in scientific publications than the others.For example, three of 32 departments in the faculty of Medicine in Mansura produced more than 49% of total publication; 35% accounted to Urology and Nephrology and 7% for each pediatrics and parasitology departments (Helal et al. 2014).Among 144 departments related to 9 medical schools in Libya, only 9 departments produced more than 49% form the total publications and 65 departments produced no papers during 20 years (Benamer et al. 2009b).Thus the variation in department productivity is likely due to difference in the quality and motivations of researchers, international collaboration, infrastructures and modern equipment availability.To the best of author knowledge, this is the first report analyzing and comparing the research productivity of faculties of Veterinary Medicine in Egypt in the period 2000-2014.The current study discuss the quantitative analysis of publications, however, it is important to analyze the impact of the Veterinary research output from the faculties of Veterinary Medicine in Egypt through analysis the citations and impact factor of Journals published this studies.

Conclusion
The current study highlighted the research productivity of different Egyptian faculties of Veterinary Medicine and ranked them according to their total publications.Such ranking will be delivered to the Veterinary committees and authorities related to the ministry of higher education in Egypt.The ranking determined the actual position of each faculty of Veterinary Medicine as well as the scientifically active departments regarding to their publication productivity on the PubMed, and that could motivate healthy competition between Egyptian Veterinary medicine faculties and their departments to increase their publications in peer reviewed Journals.The finding of the present study should serve as a starting point for offering funds needed to the research activities of different Veterinary faculties and departments, and will be a driving force for improvement the Veterinary research in Egypt.The future study will focus on the evaluation of the quality of the 712 publications produced by the Egyptian faculties of Veterinary Machine through analysis of the citations and Journal impact factors.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: PubMed-Publication contributions of Egyptian faculties of Veterinary Medicine

Figure 2 :
Year wise distribution of publications from different Faculties of Veterinary Medicine in Egypt 3.3.Period wise distribution of Faculty publications When the years were grouped into three 5-years periods, it was found that percentages of publication contribution of most faculties were the lowest in the period 2000-2004, then increased in the period 2005-2009 and reached the highest contribution percentages in the period 2010-2014 (Fig. 3).Only Suez Canal showed a decline during the period 2005-2009.Some faculties such as Beni-Suef, South Valley, Damanhour and Sohag begun to publish in the PubMed-indexed journals in the period 2010-2014, while Menoufia published only two articles; one in the period 2000-2004 and one in the period 2010-2014 with no publications in the period 2005-2009.

Figure 3 :
Period wise contribution percentage of Faculty publicationsWhen comparing the rate of change (increase or decline) between periods;

Table 4 : Distribution of faculty publications among different departments
Arya and Sharma 2012)in publication behavior of Veterinary researchers during this time is likely due to international collaboration through the scholarship funded by the higher ministry of education in Egypt, improved technology communications and increased research funding through many funders such as the Science and Technology Development Fund (STDF), which begun funding research projects in Egypt since 2008.The current study indicated researchers from different faculties of Veterinary Medicine in Egypt prefer to do research in collaboration.This result is in an agreement with results of other previous studies that reported the Veterinary researchers like to work in a team (Chanda.Arya 2012; Chanda.Arya and Sharma 2012).Research become interdisciplinary and scientists in different departments or areas of specialization have to work in a team in order to fulfill the goals of research and to have their papers published in better Journals.