Scientific production and impact of nuclear medicine in Europe: how do we publish?

We performed a bibliometric search covering a 1-year period to evaluate the number and the scientific "weight" of nuclear medicine papers published from European as compared with other countries. The scientific impact of our discipline was evaluated according to the impact factor of each publication, and we also aimed to identify those countries and topics that are making the principal contributions to the development of our discipline. To this end, a search on MEDLINE (PubMed) was run to find all peer-reviewed articles published between April 2002 and May 2003, using isotope definitions as search terms. A total of 3,292 publications were identified. Of these, 650 were of no nuclear medicine interest, 229 were reviews and 82 had no country specified. In absolute numbers, Europe leads research in nuclear medicine (939 papers, 38.9%) followed by the USA (608 papers, 25.2%). Among European countries, Germany is the nation that is currently making the greatest contribution to the scientific production of nuclear medicine in Europe. Articles concerning the use of nuclear medicine in oncology account for more than one-quarter of all published nuclear medicine papers.