A major pitfall

countries. In the last few years, the geography of biomedical publications became the subject of detailed analyses.5,6 Many of these studies relied solely on PubMed for data collection.7-14 In Arab countries, one study focused primarily on the Gulf Corporation Council member countries, and demonstrated that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) occupies a leading position in terms of biomedical publications.15 Two subsequent analyses confirmed this conclusion, but revealed drastic contradictions in the data related to some other Arab countries.4,16 That is why we aimed at a detailed investigation of this issue with an emphasis on the effect of the languages used in reporting the affiliations of Arab authors on the statistical results drawn from bibliographic databases. Non-sensitive versus sensitive search strategies on PubMed. As in our earlier study,4 non-sensitive and sensitive search strategies, including the names of Arab countries as well as their variants in several world languages, were directed to PubMed within a single hour limit (May 20th, 2003). Non-sensitive queries used in this study included simple syntaxes, such as: Qatar[affiliation], in which the tag [affiliation] has the function of collecting all published articles carrying the country name ‘Qatar’ in the affiliation field. Our 5-year experience on the evolution of biomedical research in Arab countries4,17 allowed us to compile a dictionary of highly sensitive search strategies for citations from Arab countries. The implementation of these sensitive strategies offers the advantage of collecting citations missed by non-sensitive search strategies and automatically avoiding false-positive citations like those from the affiliation "Jordan", encountered in the United Kingdom or Northern Ireland, and the affiliations "Lebanon" and "Palestine" that are city names in the United States. With the exception of Qatar and A major pitfall in the search strategy on PubMed