An Insight into the Research Performance of the Egyptian Faculties of Veterinary Medicine based on the Journal Impact Factor and Citation Counts

To assure quality in the higher education institutions, several factors should be considered. The most important factors are infrastructures, educational process and the research performance of the faculties. Research performance is measured by quantitative (publication productivity) and qualitative (journal impact factor and citation counts) indicators. My previous paper bibliometrically analyzed the productivity of the Egyptian faculties of veterinary medicine published in PubMed between 2000 and 2014. The current bibliometric study was undertaken with three aims. First to analyze the journal impact factor (IF) and citation counts of publications from different Egyptian faculties of Veterinary medicine published on PubMed between 2000 and 2014. Second, to explore the correlations between citation counts and some factors (faculty oldness, total publications, publication oldness and journal IF), and to list the journals and there frequencies used by the academics in the studied faculties. Publications were collected from the PubMed. The IF was retrieved from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and the citation counts were obtained from the Goggle Scholar (GS). The analysis revealed that about 78% of the studies were published in journals with impact factor (0.296 ≤ IF ≤ 8.167) and only 12% were in journal with no impact factor (impact factor =0). The faculties of veterinary medicine in Egypt were ranked according to the IF as follow; Cairo on the top followed by Mansura, Zagazig, Assiut, Alexandria, Suez Canal, Beni-Suef, Benha, Kafr El-sheikh, South Valley, Sohag and Menoufia. About 83% of the publications were cited at least once and up to 273 times, and about 17% were never been cited. Based on the citation counts, Cairo had the highest citations, followed by Assiut, Mansura, Alexandria, Suez Canal, BeniSuef, Kafr El-Sheikh, Benha, Zagazig, Menoufia, Damanhour, South Valley and Sohag. Citation counts showed strong positive correlations with both faculty oldness and total publications, but week correlations with both publication oldness and journal IF. Ranking of different faculties could initiate a positive competition.