Tropical Journal of Pharmaceutical Research

Original Research Article | OPEN ACCESS

A Bibliometric Study of Community Pharmacy-Based Research Activity in Middle Eastern Arab Countries: 2003 - 2012

Waleed M Sweileh¹ , Sa´ed H Zyoud¹, Ansam F Sawalha¹, Samah W Al-Jabi²

¹Department of Pharmacology/Toxicology; ²Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacotherapy, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, An-Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine.

For correspondence:- Waleed Sweileh Email: waleedsweileh@yahoo.com Tel:+970599225906

Received: 20 July 2013 Accepted: 17 July 2014 Published: 24 September 2014

Citation: Sweileh WM, Zyoud SH, Sawalha AF, Al-Jabi SW. A Bibliometric Study of Community Pharmacy-Based Research Activity in Middle Eastern Arab Countries: 2003 - 2012. Trop J Pharm Res 2014; 13(9):1549-1554 doi: 10.4314/tjpr.v13i9.24

© 2014 The authors.
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..

Abstract

Purpose: To analyze community pharmacy based research in Arab countries.

Methods: Comprehensive review of the literature indexed by Scopus was conducted. Data from Jan 01, 2003 till December 31, 2013 was searched for documents with specific words pertaining to “community pharmacy” in any one of the 13 Middle Eastern Arab countries. The quality of publication was assessed using h-index obtained from Scopus and Impact Factor (IF) obtained from Journal Citation Report (JCR).

Results: A total of 93 documents were retrieved with an h-index of 9. Thirty eight documents (40.9 %) were published in journals not listed in JCR and therefore had no IF. The sum of the IF of the 93 documents was 64.9 with a mean of 1.3 ± 2.01. The total number of citations was 338 with a mean of 3.6 ± 6.4 citations per document. The highest community pharmacy-based research was from Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) (32.3 %) followed by United Arab Emirates (UAE) (17.2 %), Jordan (16.1 %), Kuwait (11.8 %) and Qatar (10.8 %). International cooperation was highest with Malaysia (9.7 %) followed by Pakistan (7.5 %), United Kingdom (UK) (8.6 %), and Australia (6.5 %).

Conclusion: The quantity and quality of community pharmacy-based research originating from Middle Eastern Arab countries was low. More effort is needed to bridge the gap in community pharmacy-based research and to promote better community pharmacy services in Middle Eastern Arab countries.

Keywords: Community pharmacy, Middle East, Bibliometric review