Five decades lead in biomedical research: University of Khartoum tops Sudanese universities in PubMed articles

ABSTRACT

Introduction: University of Khartoum (U of K) is the largest and oldest university in Sudan (1). The recent rankings of international and local universities made by Webometrics Ranking of world Universities initiative in 2017 have placed University of Khartoum as number one University in Sudan and 1970 in rank Worldwide. This ranking system is based mainly on research activity and publications. Using PubMed we obtained data on all PubMed-indexed articles (from 1966 to 2016) affiliated to the four oldest and most established Sudanese universities University of Khartoum, University of Gezira, Omdurman Islamic University, and Al-Neelain University.Methods: Using R Statistical environment, we compiled a unified dataset from multiple resources including PubMed data and impact factor data. This unified dataset was then used to calculate multiple article and authorship metrics including total number of articles and annual averages. We also applied text mining techniques to from indexed abstracts in order to explore the prevailing trends and research focus of some the most prolific authors and to visualize this trends though word clouds.Results: Since the earliest date of PubMed indexing in 1966, the University of Khartoum is by far the most affiliated Sudanese university in PubMed. Approaching 300 articles in 2016, the number of PubMed indexed articles has shown a promising rising trend over the past decade. Our results clearly indicate lead of University of Khartoum in published biomedical research. This trend is promising and shows the attention shift towards research activities among the major Sudanese universities in general and University of Khartoum in particular