Biomedical Publications On Diabetes Mellitus, Research Gap In Developing Countries

Diabetes today is a worldwide problem. The purpose of this study is to assess, in developed and developing countries, the productivity of research on diabetes and to evaluate the gap between the burden of diabetes and research conducted on diabetes.
Materials and Methods: An extensive search in PubMed database for diabetes publications (all publication types, all languages) using diabetes as the MeSH term was carried out to ascertain the proportion of diabetes-related publications from countries of different regional (according to WHO regions) and economic (according to World Bank) classifications in 1992, 1997 and 2002. We excluded all publications without the name of a country as affiliation, as we did for publications from the U.S. following which the quota of international publications of countries was calculated. All information related to the distribution of the global burden of diabetes was extracted from the literature available.
Results: Worldwide, the overall growth rate of publications on diabetes during 1992-2002 was 66.3°/., with a higher rate during 1997-2002, as compared to that of 1992-1997 period (31% vs. 27%). The highest growth rate was found in the South and East Asia region (226%), and the second highest in the Eastern-Mediterranean region (138'Vo). However, the quota of the international publications of these two regions reached 3.9%  and 2.5% in 2002, respectively. Developed market economies (except for U.S.) contributed 85.4% (1668) of publications in 1992, 83.0'1., (2276) in 1997 and 76.7% (2806) in 2002. Contributions of developing countries increased from 12.3% (242) in 1992 to 13.8% (380) in 1997 and 19.8% (726) in 2002. Also, contributions of the developing eastern European countries rose from 2.2% (43) in 1992 to 3.1% (85) and 3.4% (125) in 1997 and 2002, respectively.
Conclusion: Despite the fast growth in prevalence of diabetes in developing countries, the quota of international publications on diabetes from developed countries is definitely higher than that of developing countries. Facilitating increases in financial resources and the indexing of national journals in these countries may serve to improve their quota.