Cardiovascular registries – bibliometric analysis of structure and characteristics

Abstract

Clinical registries play an increasingly important role in determining national health policy, financial effectiveness, and generating scientific hypotheses. However, there is no universally accepted structure for these registries in Europe or worldwide. Many countries face significant challenges in organizing their clinical registries, considering the local peculiarities of the healthcare system, political organization, financial constraints, and labor capabilities. When organizing a national registry, it is essential to find the right balance between available resources, structure, and the benefits obtained—whether scientific, financial, or related to local health policy. A possible, but incomplete, quantitative assessment of the scientific usefulness of a registry can be determined through bibliometric analysis, which examines the number of unique published articles containing scientific analyses based on the respective registry. Our study aims to analyze the correlation between various registry characteristics and the scientific value of 16 national coronary registries in Europe (plus the USA), examining the number of unique published articles in PubMed.