[Scientific collaboration and article citations: practices in medical journals].

Objective: In order to characterize scientific collaboration the best way is to study co-signature of articles. Two indicators are interesting: number of authors and international character. The objective is to study correlation between these two indicators and citation number.
Methods: We selected two pharmacy and medicine journals in order to compare practices. We used a sample of about 800 articles published in 2002-2005 for which we collected citations up to 2010. We transformed numeric variables, authors number and citation number, into qualitative variables.
Results: "Authors" and "Citations" variables are not independent.
Conclusions: Less cited articles are often published by one author or a very small team while international character of articles generally increases citation number. This micro-analysis also allowed us to better understand publication practices.
(© 2012 Société Française de Pharmacologie et de Thérapeutique.)