Bibliometrics evaluation of research performance in pharmacology/pharmacy: China relative to ten representative countries

Pharmacology/pharmacy is an important scientific field and plays a pivotal role in new drug research and development. China has steadily increased investment in drug development. This study aimed to evaluate the productivity of China in the field pharmacology/pharmacy in the past decade in relation to ten representative countries. The publications in the field pharmacology/pharmacy of China and ten representative countries in the past decade (2001–2010) were retrieved from Web of Science database, and studies were conducted on the immediacy index of articles published in 2011. Multiple bibliometric indicators were obtained from the “InCites” analysis. Most of the bibliometric indicators for the developed countries including the USA and the European countries remained stable in the past decade. The number of publications by the Asian countries, especially China, increased dramatically in the past decade year by year; however, the Asian countries improved little in the indicators assessing the scientific quality of publications including the citation behaviors and the impact relative to either country and subject area. It may need a long time to fill in the gap, in terms of the scientific quality, between the developing countries and the developed countries. In view of the dramatic increase in the financial investment, our findings suggest that the development of the field pharmacology/pharmacy worldwide is not optimistic, which may partially explain the decreased R&D productivity of pharmaceutical industry since the last decade.