Introduction
Medical research is a crucial part of improvement in healthcare, and provides advancements and alterations in both diagnostics and therapeutics. One way to assess academical research is scholarly productivity, as measured by research output. Bibliometrics is a science that integrates statistics into scholar productivity and can be useful in assessing academic yield in various levels; from an individual to global standards comparisons. This growing field of research is implemented in diverse medical fields, and with various implications such as in the use of journals’ impact factors and the assessment of specific literature on medical contributes.
Various parameters have been researched and studied in the use of bibliometrics in the medical field such as citation and publication count to reflect scholar productivity. But with the inherit drawbacks of these parameters a need for a more advanced parameter has risen, hence created the H index as published by Hirsh in 2005. This parameter allows for the comparison of different subjects whilst alimenting specific confounders such as arbitrariness and relevance of publication. Ever since, the H index has established as the standard of scientometrics and is used widely to evaluate and compare an individual’s academic work, as well as institutions and countries.
A number of papers have been published in the field of otolaryngology – head and neck surgery (ORL-HNS) concerning data of specific researchers, country to country comparison or the contribution of a specific country to overall scholarly productivity and impact. Previous studies have demonstrated a certain correlation between academic yield to percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) spent on health in other medical fields. In this article, we would like to assess national economic parameters in the Countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in a period of 24 years to ORL-HNS academics.