How international is Medical Education?
AIMS: To consider Medical Education’s claim to international status in terms of the extent of international authorship within published articles, the degree to which authors draw on the international literature to support their work, and its self-citation rates and publication decisions. METHOD: We examined 6 journals’ citation rates for the period 1997-2001 to see if there was evidence of national publication bias; we calculated their self-citation rates to see if this had any influence on impact factor, and we examined Medical Education’s management files for trends which might indicate publication bias due to country of origin of authors. RESULTS: All 6 journals exhibited a bias in favour of citing journals from their own countries. The US journals were more likely to cite journals from their own country. Medical Education was most likely to cite journals from non-UK countries. Self-citation rates did not appear to affect impact factors. The ratio of UK to non-UK papers published in
