Comparative research performance of top universities from the northeastern Brazil on three pharmacological disciplines as seen in scopus database

OBJECTIVES: Postgraduate programmes around the world are periodically subjected to research performance evaluation through bibliometric indicators. In this research, we characterized and compared the research performance of 15 universities from Northeastern Brazil, in which 13 were among the top Universities of the Latin America. METHODS: Specifically, total documents, citations and the h-index of each university were retrieved from the Elsevier Scopus database and were analysed not only for historical scientific achievement but also across the period of the past 6 years (2010–2015). Using these bibliometric indicators, we also investigated the performance of programmes at these Universities that have their papers indexed in the Scopus database under the category of “Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceuticals” for the same period. RESULTS: We found that the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) and the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) were the most productive institutions, producing 17847 and 15048 documents, respectively. The number of papers published by each of these universities in the past six years represented more than 50% of their entire productivity. With regards to their scientific output in “Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics”, UFC showed the highest number of published documents followed by UFPE and the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB). UFC received the highest h-index (with and without self-citations) and number of citations and shared their most cited papers with foreign institutions from the USA and Germany. However, papers from UFC were published in journals with lower impact factors (2.322). CONCLUSIONS: The present study shows where each of these universities stands and can be helpful in identifying potential collaborators in these areas of knowledge.