Relaţia între o evaluare bibliometrică şi clasificarea spitalelor din România după
performanţa profesională

Alexandru Dan Corlan

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Relaţia între o evaluare bibliometrică şi clasificarea spitalelor din România după performanţa profesională

Alexandru Dan Corlan,

Revista de Politica Ştiinţei şi Scientometrie 1(2):116-123, 2012

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND. In 2011, the Romanian Ministry of Health and Family (MHF) issued a classification of Romanian hospitals based primarily to their ability to provide medical assistance to the population. Hospitals were classified into 5 MHF categories, from I—highest ability, to V—lowest ability, plus two subcategories, IM and IIM, for the clinical institutes, specialised hospitals focused on advanced diagnosis, treatment and research of specific conditions. PURPOSE. In this report we aimed to verify how this classification is related to bibliometric indices. METHODS. We performed descriptive statistics on indices found for hospitals in the Ad Astra White Book of Romanian Research, that reports all romanian institutions over the 2002–2011 interval, and the MHF classification results for 2011. RESULTS. Both the number of papers published in journals indexed in Web of Science and the cumulative relative influence score were strongly associated with the MHF category. The first four categories (I, IM, II and IIM) as established on professional grounds, that include 20% of the hospitals and clinical institute, amount for 94% of the main current publications. All these hospitals are located in cities that also host medical universities. Productive research groups were identified, however, in each of the MHF the categories. All of the professional category I hospitals published more than 10 papers per decade, however in the others there is a proportion of hospitals and institutions that have not been found at all in the ISI database, and this proportion increases monotonously with the category classification. The 10 papers per decade criterion is 90% specific and 50% selective for the first four categories. CONCLUSION. Despite the fact that the professional classification methodology largely ignored bibliometric evaluation of hospitals, its results were strongly associated with the results of an entirely independent, bibliometric, assessment that was designed for the evaluation of research institutions in general. This is an illustration of the relevance of certain bibliometric indices even for the evaluation of apparently unrelated parameters, such as institutional health services performance.

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