Hip
Senior Member
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There seems to be little ME/CFS research done in France and Germany, relative to their overall scientific output. Why is this?
Using a rough method, I found that the number of ME/CFS scientific research papers published by each country is the following:
France and Germany, along with the UK, are the leading countries in Europe in terms of publishing scientific papers. Yet Germany and France seem to have published very few ME/CFS papers. In fact Norway, a country of just 5 million inhabitants, has produced more ME/CFS papers than France or Germany.
I wonder why this is. Moreover, shouldn't ME/CFS patients in France and Germany be advocating for more ME/CFS research? These countries are leading forces in science and technology, so it would be good to have them onboard.
The following diagram shows the number of scientific papers (of any sort) published by different countries around the world. As you can see, France and Germany are leading nations in terms of their overall scientific output. Yet they do very little ME/CFS research.
NOTE: I used an approximate method to determine the number of ME/CFS research papers on PubMed published in different countries: this method was to search for "chronic fatigue syndrome" or "myalgic encephalomyelitis" in the title of the paper, and to search for the particular country name in the paper.
Hopefully this method produces figures that reasonably represent the amount of ME/CFS research output in each country.
I also tried searching using the PubMed data field element [PL], which is the publication location (country of the publishing journal). The search syntax is like this. However, this did not produce accurate results, mainly because you often get researchers from different countries publishing their studies in US, UK, etc journals.
Using a rough method, I found that the number of ME/CFS scientific research papers published by each country is the following:
COUNTRY . . . . Number of ME/CFS Studies Published
United States . . . . 779
United Kingdom. . . . 595
Netherlands . . . . . 173
Belgium . . . . . . . 170
Japan . . . . . . . . 143
Australia . . . . . . 135
Canada . . . . . . . . 82
China. . . . . . . . . 78
Spain. . . . . . . . . 70
Norway . . . . . . . . 68
Italy. . . . . . . . . 68
Germany. . . . . . . . 62
Sweden . . . . . . . . 53
Israel . . . . . . . . 43
France . . . . . . . . 39
Figures accurate in Jan 2016
France and Germany, along with the UK, are the leading countries in Europe in terms of publishing scientific papers. Yet Germany and France seem to have published very few ME/CFS papers. In fact Norway, a country of just 5 million inhabitants, has produced more ME/CFS papers than France or Germany.
I wonder why this is. Moreover, shouldn't ME/CFS patients in France and Germany be advocating for more ME/CFS research? These countries are leading forces in science and technology, so it would be good to have them onboard.
The following diagram shows the number of scientific papers (of any sort) published by different countries around the world. As you can see, France and Germany are leading nations in terms of their overall scientific output. Yet they do very little ME/CFS research.
NOTE: I used an approximate method to determine the number of ME/CFS research papers on PubMed published in different countries: this method was to search for "chronic fatigue syndrome" or "myalgic encephalomyelitis" in the title of the paper, and to search for the particular country name in the paper.
Hopefully this method produces figures that reasonably represent the amount of ME/CFS research output in each country.
I also tried searching using the PubMed data field element [PL], which is the publication location (country of the publishing journal). The search syntax is like this. However, this did not produce accurate results, mainly because you often get researchers from different countries publishing their studies in US, UK, etc journals.
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