Performance of Cancer Research in Taiwan Yu-Ting Feng1#, I-Hsin Lin1, Wen-Ta Chiu2,3 and Yuh-Shan Ho4* 1School of Public Health, Taipei Medical University 2Graduate Institute of Injury Prevention and Control, Taipei Medical University 3Department of Neurosurgery, Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital 4Bibliometric Centre, Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital Introduction Cancer has been the first leading cause of deaths in Taiwan since 1982. The ages of patients with cancer are found to be declined year by year. According to the statistics of the Department of Health (DOH) , there are approximately forty-five thousand people suffered from cancers in the year of 2001 and is increasing in Taiwan . Most of the patients are found in late stage of the disease when diagnosed and are destined to death of no effective treatments. Evaluating the performance of each research topic is necessary in order to indicate the impact of and contribution of authors to their respective fields. Our purpose was to study the cancer research of Taiwan performance based on 9537 documents published in Science Citation Index (SCI)-indexed periodicals between 1991 and 2005. These documents were analyzed and evaluated according to publication distribution and were used to determine the quantitative characteristics of cancer research. Methods Documents used in this study were based on the databases of the SCI which was accessed from the ISI Web of Science. Cancer and carcinoma were used as keywords to search titles, abstracts, and keywords. Results Table 4. Fifteen most productive author institutes Table 1. Regions distribution of International collaborative publications Table 2. Top ten of subject category Table 3. Top ten of author keyword used Figure 1. Number of articles between 1991 and 2005 Conclusions A quadratic and logarithmic relation between yearly cumulative number of publications and the year were obtained for the 2 periods from 1991 to 1994 and 1994 to 2004. Three most regions of international collaborative countries were ‘Taiwan’, ‘USA’, and ‘Japan’ from 1991 to 2005. Five most used author keywords were ‘apoptosis’, ‘hepatocellular carcinoma’, ‘nasopharyngeal carcinoma’, ‘duodenal ulcer’, and ‘peptic ulcer’ from 1991 to 2005. Three most of subject category were ‘Oncology’, ‘Surgery’, and ‘Biochemistry & Molecular Biology’ from 1991 to 2005. ‘Natl Taiwan Uni Hosp’, ‘Natl Taiwan Uni’, ‘Chang Gung Mem Hosp’ were the three most author’s institutes from 1991 to 2005.