ABSTRACT
Objectives The purpose of this analysis was to investigate the quantity and quality of medical students' research output in Gulf Cooperation Council countries to aid in developing strategies to improve research output. Methods Abstracts presented by medical students in Gulf Cooperation Council countries were subject to analysis. Abstracts that propagated into full-length articles underwent further demographic analysis, in which data regarding the type of study, the field of study, country of origin, mode of presentation, and journal's impact factor were collected. A total of 798 abstracts were surveyed, with 19% (n=155) of the abstracts submitted by Gulf Cooperation Council countries progressing into full-length publications. The average impact factor for Gulf Cooperation Council country publications was found to be 1.85 ± 0.26 (standard error). Countries that recorded the highest conversion rates were, in descending order, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Moreover, basic biomedical and clinical research topics were more likely to be published in comparison with community-oriented and medical education-related topics. Conclusions Effective efforts to encourage more medical student research output in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (with a focus on qualitative analysis) should be promoted in order to achieve publication rates comparable with those reported by developed countries.
ABSTRACT
Drug advertisement brochures (DABs) contain claims that are often supplemented by references in medical literature. Several studies have evaluated the DABs as they are commonly distributed by drug companies to practicing physicians. The objective of this study is to assess the consistency between the claims and references referred to in the DABs in Saudi Arabia. DABs were collected from medical practitioners in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Authors developed a protocol to be followed for quality assessment of the DABs. The vast majority of cited scientific papers were indexed in PubMed. Consequently, each reference was categorized as: justifiable, false, exaggerated or ambiguous. A total of 89 DABs were collected; 48 (53.9%) brochures were excluded from further analysis and the remaining 41 brochures (46.1%) contained 240 references with an approximate average of 5.9 references per DAB. A total of 201 cited papers were traced (83.8%). The majority of references (93.0%) supported the claims for which they were cited. However, 1.5%, 4.0% and 1.5% of claims were deemed inaccurate/false, exaggerated, and ambiguous, respectively. This study supports that the majority of the claims made in the DABs of pharmaceutical companies in Saudi Arabia were unreferenced. However, most of the evidence presented to substantiate claims made was considered true.
