Aims: In general surgery and family medicine speciality training, it is emphasised that physicians should understand the approach to surgical diseases, be familiar with these diseases, and keep up to date by accessing new literature. To achieve this, physicians must recognise, access, and follow surgical journals. In this context, it is aimed to evaluate the surgical journals in the TR Index in order to provide convenience and guidance to physicians in our study.
Methods: Our study is descriptive and the number of annual publications, language of publication, format of publication, publication language, publication format, and publication of 96 journals, the subject area of which is surgery, which were available on the TR Directory Internet Site (https://trdizin.gov.tr/) on 20.04.2025. year, the number of published articles, the number of citations received, the citation average, the number of self-citations, the rate of self-citation, the number of cited articles, and the types of articles published.
Results: Considering the annual publication numbers of the journals, 49% (n=47) of the journals were published four times a year, 53.13% (n=51) were published in English-Turkish, 54.17% (n=51) of the journals were the most common publication format. 52) electronically, 5.21% (n=5) never published an article, 11.46% (n=11) were never cited, 22.92% (n=22) had no self-citation, 12.50% (n=12) did not publish cited articles, and 61.16% (n=27 724) research articles were published most frequently in these journals.
Conclusion: The frequent use of English in the journals examined may be due to their inclusion in the TR Index and the specific standards required there. The promotion of electronic publishing in the TR Index through improvements may have influenced the frequent use of electronic formats. It was observed that some journals did not publish any articles, did not receive citations, or did not publish articles that received citations. This may be related to the timeliness of the data in the TR Index, as well as the structure of the journals examined. Our study is limited in that it only includes TR Index data. There is a need for broader descriptive studies that include other indexes, databases, and relevant journal websites that measure the scientific impact of journals, as well as evaluations of the opinions, attitudes, and behaviours of surgeons and family physicians on this subject. However, the findings obtained may contribute to family physicians and surgery-related clinicians making more informed decisions regarding literature tracking and journal selection.
