Scientific production in pharmaceutical care: comparison between Brazil, USA and Spain

Abstract

The aim of this study was to estimate the evolution of the field of Pharmaceutical Care (PC) by measuring the quality and quantity of the scientific production on the topic of PC in Brazil compared to two pioneering countries in the field, the United States of America (USA) and Spain. The databases Web of Science, Scopus, Medline, Lilacs and SciELO were used as sources for the literature search. Pharmaceutical Care, or the appropriate translations, was used as the search term for the literature search, which was limited to articles published between 1990 and 2009. A score of quality (SQ) was calculated using variables such as impact factor and the frequency of the citations. We included 3265 articles published in 544 journals. We found that there was a steady increase in scientific production since 1990 and that the USA had a higher quality of scientific production than Spain, whereas the Spain produced the highest quantity of articles. In comparison, the Brazilian production of scientific publications on PC is low in terms of both quality and quantity but has increased steadily since 2002. Nevertheless, Brazil has not yet reached the level of the USA or Spain. In conclusion, Brazil's scientific production has evolved over the second decade studied in this work, with particularly high levels of production in the last five years. However, an increase in the quantity and quality of the publications should be encouraged.