A Bibliometric Analysis of Ophthalmology, Medicine, and Surgery Journals: Comparing Citation Metrics and International Collaboration

To evaluate SCImago’s top ranked ophthalmology journals, comparing them with the top medical and surgical journals.

Data over 20 years was extracted for the top-ranked 20 ophthalmology, top 5 medical, and top 5 surgical journals based on SCImago Journal Ranking (SJR). Trends in SJR, self-citations, external citations per document, uncited documents, international collaboration, citations per document, and total citations were identified. ANCOVA analysis was utilized to further characterize average trends over time between medicine, ophthalmology and surgery.

The fields of medicine, ophthalmology, then surgery had the highest SJR while medicine, surgery, then ophthalmology had the highest h-indices. Medicine had 1.01 uncited per cited article, compared to 0.54 and 0.43 for ophthalmology and surgery. Percent of self-citation was 5.9% for ophthalmology, 5.0% for surgery, and 0.56% for medicine; however, self-citations per article were the highest for surgery. International collaboration was highest for ophthalmology (19.14%) compared to surgery (16.75%) and medicine (8.00%). Medicine increased disproportionately in SJR (p= 0.0037), citations per document (p <0.001), and total citations (p<0.001) compared to surgery and ophthalmology over the last 20 years. Ophthalmology had the largest decrease in the percent of uncited articles (p=0.0006).

Ophthalmology has a lower h-index compared to surgery and medicine but was comparable when using more qualitative measures including SJR and uncited articles. Ophthalmology has the highest number of self-citations and the greatest level of international collaboration.