• Tsahi T Lerman, Boris Fishman, Olga Reitblat, Tatiana Reitblat, Elad Goldberg, and Ilan Krause.
• Department of Internal Medicine F-Recanati, Rabin Medical Center, Beilinson Hospital, Petah Tikva, Israel; Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel. Electronic address: tsahilerman@gmail.com.
• Am. J. Med. Sci. 2021 Nov 1; 362 (5): 480-485.

BackgroundPrevious studies have demonstrated a correlation between national economic indicators and academic productivity. However, such a relationship has not been studied in the field of internal medicine (IM).MethodsThe number of documents published, number of citable documents, number of citations, citations per document and the h index between 1996 and 2019 in the field of IM among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries were analysed. Data were derived from the The Scimago Journal and Country rank source. We analysed the correlation between these indicators to the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, health spending as percent of GDP and gross domestic expenditure on research and development as percent of GDP (GERD). Economic data were collected from the OECD websites.ResultsA significant correlation was found between health expenditure and h index (r = 0.75, P < 0.001), number of citations (r = 0.72, P < 0.001), number of documents (r = 0.62, P < 0.001) and number of citable documents (r = 0.61, P < 0.001); between GERD and number of citations (r = 0.6, P < 0.001), h index (r = 0.6, P < 0.001), number of documents published (r = 0.53, P = 0.001) and citable documents (r = 0.51, P = 0.001); between the GDP per capita and number of citations (r = 0.46, P = 0.005), citations per document (r = 0.54, P = 0.001) and h index (r = 0.5, P = 0.002).ConclusionsThis study demonstrated a positive correlation between academic productivity in the field of IM and economic indicators of the OECD countries, mainly health expenditure, implying the advantage of domestic investment in health.Copyright © 2021 Southern Society for Clinical Investigation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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