[Bibliometric profile of Tunisians medicals publications indexed in Medline from 2000 to 2003 part 2: social relevance].

OBJECTIVE

This work, which is part of the medical documentary wakefulness, tries to evaluate the social relevance of the Tunisian medical publications indexed in the Medline's database.

METHODS

This descriptive study covered the whole of the articles indexed in "Medline" between 2000 and 2003. We retained the medical papers whose author's address was a Tunisian health structure of either medical care or education with the first and / or the last author was a Tunisian doctor. The social relevance of the publications was measured by the agreement level of their content, studies through the "Major Essential Key Words" with the death causes and the morbidity global charge components, made by the World Health Organisation in its "report about the health in the world" in 2003. A "Major Essential Key Word" is a word chosen among the word's list "MeSH Major Topic" proposed by the bibliographic notice of Medline's database to summarize the essential topic of the article.

RESULTS

The 1248 articles eligible to this study, have been indexed in "Medline" by "MeSH Major Topic" words using 3471 indexation lines. Among the "Top 20" list of the "Major Essential Key Words" only 9 themes were concordant with the community health needs, including four in relation with the epidemiologic "pre transition" epidemiology (tuberculosis, pregnancy complications, lung diseases, anemia) and five in connection with the epidemiologic "post transition" epidemiology (diabetes mellitus, breast neoplasms, leukemia, cardiovascular diseases, multiple myeloma).

CONCLUSION

What emerges from this study is that medical research in Tunisia isn't concordant enough with the country epidemiologic priorities and public health national programs . The social relevance should be the principal selection criterion in the public financing of the research projects.