Re: the obstacles facing scientific and medical publishing in Saudi Arabia.

To the Editor: I thought it might be helpful to point out some errors that might affect interpretation of the data in the recent report on the Annals of Saudi Medicine.1 Figure 3 is a graph from SCImago showing cited and uncited articles (not citable and uncitable, as suggested in the caption). The gradual increase in cited articles is not surprising since that is the definition of the impact factor, which rose steadily over the years. The authors may have confused this graph with the one immediately preceding it on SCImago, which shows the non-citable vs citable data (Figure 1),2 which remained about the same over the years. Thus, the assertion of a relationship between the citable articles and the h-index is not supported by this data. In fact, less citable material can increase the impact factor (one means of manipulating the impact factor),3 and presumably the h-index.4 As the number of “citables” decreases, the impact factor increases because the denominator is smaller.

Figure 1

Citable vs. non-citable documents published in the Annals of Saudi Medicine (top) and the Saudi Medical Journal (bottom) in recent years.2

The h-index may correlate with the impact factor, but the h-index often varies by source.4 In Google Scholar Metrics, the h-index is 23 for the Annals and 19 for the Saudi Medical Journal for “articles published between 2009 and 2013, both inclusive. The metrics are based on citations from all articles that were indexed in Google Scholar in June 2014”.

Regardless, this call for action will hopefully contribute to local publication of research that resulted in Saudi Arabia having the greatest increase in the top 1% of most-cited papers of all leading science countries in 2012 (Figure 2).5 The journal is poised to take part in a new age of exciting changes in scientific publishing.6

Figure 2

Number of research papers published in 2012 and percentage increase from 2011 for leading science nations.5