Assessing the impact of latin-american and spanish journals in Psychiatry as seen through bibliographic databases

Introduction: The analysis of the scientific output in the health sciences is a complex proccess and there not exists a methodology accepted by researchers, institutions and research evaluation agencies. On the other hand, there is a growing interest by these groups in evaluating the performance of research systems. The impact of journals is one way to determine this performance but traditionally it has been limited to the ISI database. In this paper, taking as starting point a science specialty like Psychiatry, a comparative study of new databases useful for this kind of analysis has been carried out. We have applied a pool of bibliometric indicators well known that offers the possibility of making comparisons between them. The reference choosen for all is the ISI-JCR
Specific Purpose: The main purpose of this paper is to study the quantitative and qualitative characteristic s of Latin-American and Spanish Psychiatry journals indexed in: ISI, Scielo, Scopus, IME, and IN-Recs (health). At the same time we analize the weight and performance of the different countries represented in this specialty
Methodology: The databases selected: ISI; Scielo; Scopus; IME, and In-Recs (health) are the only ones that issue the information needed for calculating the impact indicators giving as well address information of authors, opening in this manner the possibility of doing geographical domain analysis. In this paper the following indicators are used: EIF (expected impact factor), OIF (observed impact factor), AIF (average impact factor) SSI (subject specialization index).
Results: This is a pilot study whose results will allow for the first time a radiography of the impact of Latin-American and Spanish research in ISI alternative databases and a comparison with that international database. We present and discuss the ranking of journals based on the bibliometric indicators proposed and the differences between the databases analysed. Finally, the importance of the different countries is studied