Correlation between Download and Citation and Download-citation Deviation Phenomenon for Some Papers in Chinese Medical Journals

The authors collected the numbers of citations and downloads from 2005 to 2009 of papers in five Chinese general ophthalmological journals: Recent Advances in Ophthalmology, Chinese Ophthalmic Research, Ophthalmology in China, Journal of Clinical Ophthalmology and Chinese Journal of Practical Ophthalmology, published in 2005 from the Chinese Academic Journals Full-text Database and the Chinese Citation Database in Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) to determine the correlation between download and citation and the peak time of download frequency (DF). The citations from 2000 to 2009 of papers published in 2000 were collected to determine the peak time of citation frequency (CF) of medical papers. There is a highly positive correlation between DF and CF (r = 4.91, P = 0.000).