New bibliometric techniques for the evaluation of medical schools

Bibliometrics have been used in novel ways to assist with the evaluation of two medical schools, one in England and one in Sweden. The first evaluation was intended to allow the relative strengths in 26 subfields of five component campuses to be estimated. Selective filters for each subfield were defined, many of them with the help of the school's research staff, so that relevant papers could be retrieved from a database on the basis of their title keywords and specialist journals. The campus outputs were then analysed by the research level of the journals (clinical/basic) and their influence. In the second evaluation, nine different indicators of research output were produced so that the school could be compared with four others in Scandinavia. The indicators included measures of output, co-authorship, journal esteem and citations by papers and by patents.