Increased expenditure on Australian health and medical research and changes in numbers of publications determined using PubMed.

OBJECTIVE

To determine temporal trends in PubMed publications for Australian authors compared with changes in funding for health and medical research (HMR).

DESIGN

Retrospective observational study.

SETTING

Internet-based bibliometric study that collated Australian HMR expenditure from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and Australian (and other) research publications from PubMed.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Australian expenditure on HMR and numbers of PubMed-cited publications from 1980 to 2004, with subgroup analyses for universities, clinical trials, and genetic and biotechnology research, and comparison with similar results from the United Kingdom and New Zealand.

RESULTS

From 1980-81 to 2003-04, Australian HMR expenditure increased from $66 million to $1503 million and total Australian PubMed publications increased from 844 to 13 836. From 1995-96 to 2003-04, Australian publications for university-derived research and for clinical trials increased at a fairly constant rate. Genetic and biotechnology publications increased about fivefold (49 to 277) between 1990-91 and 2003-04. Between 1990 and 2004, total publications increased from 1754 to 3288 for New Zealand and from 12 401 to 19 600 for the UK.

CONCLUSIONS

There is an association between increased funding for HMR and increased publications, as determined using PubMed, in the past 10 years. Using PubMed may be a simple way to track output from HMR expenditure.