NURSING RESEARCH IN THE MIDDLE EAST: A MULTI-LAYER BIBLIOMETRIC STUDY

Nurses along with other clinical professions play important role on people's
health around the world. However various bibliometric analysis in medical care have shown a notable
level of sophistication, a few bibliometric analysis has been done to shed light nursing research
characteristics in the Middle East.
Materials & Methods: To assess the contributions and achievements of the Middle East researchers
working in the field of nursing, bibliometric analysis was carried out based on the citation data
retrieved from Scopus.
Results: Despite acceptable numbers of published articles, Middle East countries have few nursing
journals with very low comparable citation rates and IF. 60% of articles in the Middle East countries
have been published by two countries (Israel and Turkey). The three highest mean citations per article
were 19.65, 16.27 and 16.04 for the researchers of Israel, Jordan and Turkish, respectively. The
highest self-citation rate belongs to Iran (37%) and Bahrain (30%) nurses, respectively. Further
analysis confirmed the Pareto's Principle or the 80-20 rule that 80% of publications stem from 20% of
authors.
Conclusion: Israel, Turkey and Iran are the most leading countries in science production in the Middle
East. Countries like Egypt or Persian Gulf states (other than Iran) are standing far behind these three
countries in medical sciences.