[Reliability of a bibliometric tool used in France for hospital founding].

UNLABELLED

SIGAPS is a bibliometric score that aims at making an inventory, evaluating and promoting scientific publications of hospitals that perform research. It has become a major stake in France since it is one of the most important components of the MERRI (Mission Training, Research, Reference and Innovation) founding of hospitals. This score is based on the points attributed to the authors of articles published in journals indexed in Medline, according to the rank of the authors and the Impact Factor of the journal.

OBJECTIVES

to compare the reliability of the score when applying different way of computing it, and different weights for the rank or the Impact Factor.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

we computed the scores of all the physicians of a University Hospital, using the rules that are actually applied at the national level. We then used 4 different scenarios, with different weight given to the rank of authors or the Impact Factor. We compared the scores obtained by each author according to the different scenarios with the Spearman's rank and Pearson's correlation coefficients.

RESULTS

The score is not significantly affected when no points are given to the fourth authors and above, when the last author get more points or to change the points according to the Impact Factor of the journal.

CONCLUSION

The different scenarios do not lead to significant changes for the physicians' scores, and therefore for the cumulated score of the hospital. Despite the well known limits of bibliometric indicators, the SIGAPS score appears reliable to compare the hospitals for founding decisions.