Situation of medical sciences in 50 top countries from 1996 to 2010--based on quality and quantity of publications.

In research outputs both quality and quantity are of critical value and evaluation of both aspects is required for best evaluation. Several studies have worked on single or two-dimensional methods that provide the assessment of quality, quantity or both simultaneously in different branches of sciences, but none of them have played a role in a particular area of medicine. This study has been conducted to compare countries worldwide in the field of medical researches. Measuring both quality and quantity of researches is performed separately. In order to evaluate countries from both aspects of quantity and quality of research outputs, a modified form of the citation per publication (CPPm) and publication per population (PPPm) were used to make these indices comparable through different years and nations by normalizing the values according to the world average standards. When countries are ranked by CPPm, Iceland ranks the 1st with the score of 1.98, Faroe Islands and Gambia rank the 2nd and the 3rd with scores of 1.84 and 1.63, respectively. In PPPm Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark ranked the top three with scores of 13.34, 11.67 and 10.32, respectively. Iran ranked 71 in CPPm and 141 in PPPm. Ranking countries makes it possible to identify countries which have performed better in research outcomes by means of quality and quantity; thus, reforming policies can be taken into action to lower the waste of money, higher quality and quantity of outputs while providing helpful tip(s) for institutions to improve.