Abstract
BACKGROUND: Scientific publications and academic research are objective indicators that provide dynamic views of the evolution of emergency medicine (EM). This study is aimed to evaluate the academic contribution of Taiwan emergency departments (EDs) by analyzing scientific publications. METHODS: This is an observational study and all publications between 2012 and 2017 were retrieved from the Scopus database. The EM journals were adopted from the 2016 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) category of EM. Three groups of publications were enrolled: (1) publications with first authors affiliated with Taiwan EDs in EM journals; (2) publications with first authors affiliated with Taiwan EDs in non-EM journals; (3) publications with first authors affiliated with Taiwan other than EDs in EM journals. Data regarding the name and category of the publishing journal, the publication year, the publication type, and the number of citations were collected for further analysis. The publication and category numbers were also merged with previous study to obtain a longer trend analysis from 1992. RESULTS: A total of 291 publications affiliated with Taiwan EDs were published in EM journals and 697 publications in 275 non-EM journals. A total of 286 publications in EM journals affiliated with Taiwan but other than ED. The trend of publication numbers in all three groups and category numbers since 1992 were increasing (all p < 0.001). Publication numbers in non-EM journals increased the most and obtained the highest cited times. The 275 non-EM journals were classified into 69 categories. The leading five categories were Medicine, General & Internal, Multidisciplinary Sciences, Surgery, Infectious Diseases, Geriatrics & Gerontology. CONCLUSIONS: The importance of researches originating from Taiwan EDs has been increasingly recognized by both the global EM community and by other medical specialties during the past 25 years. The advancement of academic contribution by Taiwan EDs is evident from the perspectives of quantity and breadth.