Barcelona and Madrid occupy second and third place, behind London, in the European ranking of cities in scientific production on Alzheimer’s, according to a study by the bibliometrics company Research Marks Analytics. The two cities are in the top ten of the world ranking, led by New York and Boston, with Barcelona in seventh position, and Madrid in tenth.
“The data place Spain as one of the leading countries in dementia and Alzheimer’s research on a global scale”, notes the study, not yet published, to which La Vanguardia has had access.
The work is based on data from the five-year period 2017-2021 taken from the medical research search engine PubMed, reports Raul Méndez-Vásquez, data analyst at Research Marks Analytics and one of its authors. Based on information from PubMed, many types of data can be analyzed on research published in nearly 5,000 scientific journals.
The study, commissioned by the Pasqual Maragall Foundation and funded by the Ministry of Social Rights and the 2030 Agenda, is the first to separately analyze bibliometric information on dementia and Alzheimer’s.
The results show that 1,413 publications on Alzheimer’s published between 2017 and 2021 are authored or co-authored by scientists working in Spanish institutions, which represents 5.2% of global scientific production on the disease.
Barcelona, ??with 540 jobs, and Madrid, with 525, lead Spanish production. They are ahead of other European cities with outstanding activity in the area of ??neuroscience, such as Stockholm (514 articles on Alzheimer’s), Amsterdam (479) or Paris (476).
“We have a first-class international scientific ecosystem in the field of Alzheimer’s, which is something we suspected and which we now see confirmed with data”, declares Arcadi Navarro, director of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation. The number of researchers who have published works on Alzheimer’s in the analyzed five-year period is 718 in Barcelona and 854 in Madrid.
According to Navarro, “Barcelona stands out especially in clinical research and prevention, with a very active participation in clinical trials, while Madrid perhaps stands out more in molecular and cellular biology research” that help to better understand the disease.
The study by Research Marks Analytics shows that 67% of the Alzheimer’s research in which Barcelona has participated, and 56% of those in Madrid, have been done in collaboration with scientific institutions in other countries. These figures are comparable to those of other cities in Europe, and higher than those of the United States and China.
But international collaborations do not imply that Spanish scientists play a secondary role in Alzheimer’s projects. They lead, or more often collide, research in a similar percentage to scientists in other countries. Specifically, 85% of the research in which Madrid has participated and 83% of those in Barcelona are led or co-led by local scientists, percentages similar to those in New York (80%), Boston (79%) or London (82%). ).
An analysis of the impact of research, which is calculated from the number of times that each article is cited in the scientific literature, places the quality of Spanish scientific production on alzheimer at a level comparable to that of the United States, France or Sweden, although slightly lower than the UK.
“The good data from Barcelona can be explained by the dynamics of collaboration between hospitals, universities and research centers, and also by the impact of pioneering figures who promoted Alzheimer’s research such as Rafael Blesa [hospital of Sant Pau], Mercè Boada [ACE Foundation] or Pasqual Maragall himself”, highlights Arcadi Navarro, who was Secretary of Universities and Research of the Generalitat before joining the Pasqual Maragall Foundation.
Based on this basis, Navarro advocates for “stimulating greater coordination between research groups and facilitating the attraction of talent to work in the field of Alzheimer’s. It is something in which the City Council, the Generalitat and the State can play an important role and in which the Pasqual Maragall Foundation is ready to help as much as it can”.
