[Publish or perish: the scientific productivity of academics in the field of occupational medicine].

INTRODUCTION

A new Italian law aiming at improving and supporting research productivity establishes that evaluation of academic products is a requisite for accessing research funds,for acting as examiner for recruitments and for individual financial benefits.

AIM

To analyse the scientific products of full professors of Occupational Medicine in Italian Universities in order to provide a framework for discussing a standard of productivity with objective metric parameters.

POPULATION AND METHODS

Research products of the 40 full professors of Occupational Medicine indexed in the National Library of Medicine PubMed database were identified. By means of l0 different indicators, including the total number of papers, the papers published in journals included in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), total Impact Factor (IF), the individual productivity of the last 5 years was measured.

RESULTS

In the last 5 years 503 scientific products were published, 231 of which in JCR-indexed journals, with a mean individual IF = 16.741. The total number of papers indexed in PubMed, the number of papers included in JCR-indexed journals and the number of papers included in JCR-indexed journal of Public, Environmental & Occupational Health were associated with the overall number of authors (p < 0.001). This observation accounts for the relevance of the research group as a resource predicting qualitative and quantitative outputs. The total number of papers is inversely associated with age (p < 0.03).

CONCLUSION

High productivity authors have an elevated number of products both in JCR-indexed journals (targeted to a small number of specialists in the field) and in PubMed-indexed journal (addressed to the broad audience of occupational health professionals). The productivity standard of academics of Occupational Medicine should take into account the overall research products within the Public Health field. In addition, the standard should be shared with that of academics of Hygiene and of Forensic medicine in order to address the recruitment policy in the Public Health field