Three decades of CMJ - an analysis using PubMed

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: The Ceylon Medical Journal (CMJ) is the only Sri Lankan medical journal that is indexed in MEDLJNE, the largest electronic bibliographic medical database. Publications in the CMJ from 1965 March to 2001 December were analyzed using the PubMed interface of MEDLINE. METHOD: Using PubMed we download the CMJ bibliography in MEDLINE format. Important tagged fields were written to a MS-Access database using a Visual Basic program. The analysis was done using Access-SQL and PubMed queries. RESULTS: There were 1472 citations by 1373 authors. The top 10 authors contributed 15.6% and the top 25, 30.1% of the articles. Lamabadusuriya SP(32), Uragoda CG(31), de Silva HJ(28), de Silva DG(23) and Lucas GN(22) were the top contributors. 944 authors had only one and 176 had two articles. Publications types were: 84.9% 'journal articles', 12.8% letters, 5.2% reviews and 5.1% historical articles. Randomized controlled trials were 0.7%, meta-analysis 0.1%. Articles were classified using 2 to 44 keywords (average 11.4, mode 9) from the MeSH vocabulary. Articles published that were classified under'broad disease categories were: Neoplasm ,174(11.82%), Cardiovascular 159(10.8%), Nervous system 157(10.67%), Endocrine, nutritional and metabolic 157(10.67%), Digestive system 151(10.26%), Musculoskeletal, skin and connective tissue 131(8.9%), Respiratory 113(7.68%). DISCUSSION: For the majority of the 1373 authors, publishing in the CMJ was a onetime affair whilst the top 50 authors contributed for nearly half (46.4%). A by-product of this research is an offline CMJ database system with menu driven search facilities, which will be a useful tool for researchers.