The Journal Quartile Details as Indicators for the Quality of Dermatological Research in India from 2012 to 2021

In March 2022, Manjula Nayak et al. published a very interesting article entitled “Dermatological Research in India: A Brief Bibliometric Analysis of Publications During 1999–2019.” [1]

The authors used SCImago journal rank indicator/s and reported the Indian research publications in ten dermatological journals. The highest documents are published in Journal of Dermatology (n = 174), followed by Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (n = 170), and British Journal of Dermatology (n = 112).

In the same vein, I tried to explore the quality of Indian’s output in dermatology from 2011 to 2020. For the purpose on June 1, 2022, the data were retrieved from Scopus/Scival database. First of all in countries section, India was selected. The years ranged from 2012 to December 2021. In subject section, the medical field and later dermatology was selected. All types (e.g., articles, reviews, and letters) of publications were analyzed.

A total of 11,017 authors published 7730 research documents, with 95,354 views, and 51,633 total citations. In fact, 2869 authors published 1525 documents with 9434 citations in Indian Journal of Dermatology. However, 2278 authors contributed in 1363 documents with 7727 citations in Indian Journal of Dermatology, Venereology and Leprology. In 16 (n = 16) and 10 (n = 10) journals, the authors published more than 100 or 51–100 documents, respectively.

Based on the number of publications, the highest documents are published by Vinay, K. (n = 148), followed by Dogra, Sunil (n = 137), and Saikia, Uma Nahar (n = 115). However, the highest citations were noted for Parsad, Davinder (n = 1563), Dogra, Sunil (n = 1349), and Kanwar, Amrinderjit (n = 1217). Similarly, the highest h-index was recorded for Chakrabarti, Arunaloke (n = 58), Pandey, Ravindra Mohan (n = 57), and Chowdhary, Anuradha (n = 55).

The idea was extended and descriptive details about the productivity of institutions were collected. The highest documents and citations were noted for Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (NoP = 633, TC = 5646), followed by University of Delhi (NoP = 544, TC=4458) and All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi (NoP = 401, TC = 3387).

Sources or journals ranking can be used as indicator to depict the quality of publications. For 7378 documents, the quartile data was obtained. Approximately 78% (or 5810) documents were published in top 25%–75% journals. Approximately 8.1% or 595 documents were published in top five to 25% journals. Furthermore, only 3.6% (or 263) or 0.35% (or 26) documents were published in top 1%–5% or in the top 1% journals, respectively. I agree with M Nayak et al. that more efforts are needed to “conduct quality research and publish in reputed dermatological journals.”