Publications in scopus and institutional license status of the medical schools of Peru

Abstract

Introduction: Universities are the institutions called to lead research for the development of society. In Peru there is a proliferation of medical schools and a large number of enrolled students, however, research in many of them is far from desirable. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the scientific production in the Scopus database of all medical schools through a bibliometric review and its comparison with the degree of licensure by the National Superintendence of Higher University Education of Peru. Methods: A review of the Scopus database was made, looking for papers published between 2016 and 2019 by members of the Peruvian medical schools. The search was performed with the official Scopus file of the 44 universities that have medical schools and each of the publications found was manually reviewed. Results: During the period, Peruvian medical schools published 3471 papers in Scopus, 3398 were from faculties licensed and 73 were from faculties with denied licenses. During the period 6 universities have published more than 100 papers, all from the group of universities with institutional licenses. Was found that medical schools with institutional have statistical higher scientific production than not licensed schools (p = 0,02). Conclusion: The scientific production carried out by the medical schools of Peru is scarce in the group of non-licensed universities and should be encouraged by the country's science institutions.