Quality evaluation of medical research by Kawasaki Medical School using bibliometric analysis *
Although the research output from Kawasaki Medical School has been constant or has slightly increased annually over the past 10 years, the research performance has not been evaluated in detail, partly because of the lack of an appropriate index. Here, we evaluated the medical research outcome using bibliometric citation analysis and demonstrated the ranking of Kawasaki Medical School relative to other medical schools in Japan. Using the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases, we found that in terms of the past five- to 10-year research output Kawasaki Medical School ranked number 121 in Japan; in terms of excellence, as indicated by the ratio of highly cited papers to the total number of publications within each research field, the school ranked number 53 in the country. A comparison of 27 medical schools of a similar size in Japan using the institutional h-index produced a ranking of number 19 for publications in the period of 2002 to 2011; this represents an increase from number 27 in the previous evaluation using the same index, which was carried out five years ago. When research evaluation was conducted for major individual researchers at Kawasaki Medical School using the Google Scholar database with "Publish or Perish" software, highquality publications appeared in the areas of both basic and clinical medicine. These results point to the usefulness of bibliometric analysis for assessing research quality and performance. (Accepted on April 4, 2012)
