Bibliometric analysis of scientific publications in endocrinology and metabolism from China, Japan, and South Korea

A study of 25 years of publication outputs in the German academic profession

In the weak evaluation state of Germany, full professors are involved in the traditional social governance partnership between the state, and the self-governing higher education institutions (HEI) and disciplinary associations. Literature suggests that formal and informal governance could trigger changes in academics’ publication behavior by valorizing certain publication outputs. In the article, secondary data from three surveys (1992, 2007 and 2018) is used for a multi-level study of the evolution of academics’ publication behavior. We find a trend toward the “model” of natural science publication behavior across all disciplines. On the organizational level, we observe that a strong HEI research performance orientation is positively correlated with journal articles, peer-reviewed publications, and co-publications with international co-authors. HEI performance-based funding is only positively correlated with the share of peer-reviewed publications. At the level of individual disciplines, humanities and social sciences scholars adapt to the peer-reviewed journal publication paradigm of the natural sciences at the expense of book publications. Considering how the academic profession is organized around reputation and status, it seems plausible that the academic profession and its institutional oligarchy are key contexts for the slow but steady change of academics’ publication behavior. The trend of changing academics’ publication behavior is partly related to HEI valorization of performance and (to a lesser extent) to HEI performance based-funding schemes, which are set by the strong academic profession in the weak evaluation state of Germany.

Trends in diabetes research outputs in South Africa over 30 years from 2010 to 2019: A bibliometric analysis

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is one of the leading causes of mortality in South Africa, which is impelled by people's consumption of unhealthy diets and lifestyles, negligence about an individual's health status, and increased urbanization. DM can be linked to several human diseases and thus, making it an important public health issue in the South African health sector. Therefore, it is necessary to assess the level of research that has been conducted in the country on diabetes, in a quest for solutions against the deadly disease. Hence, the present study aimed to map diabetes-related research in South Africa from 2010 to 2019. Data on the subject was retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) and bibliometrix package in Rstudio statistical software was used to analyze the data while VOSviewer was explored for data visualization networks. Our analysis revealed that the annual growth rate of publication trends was 23.2%. The authors per document were 23.3 with a collaboration index of 23.4. From the 416 articles analyzed, Islam MS (n = 34) was the most prolific author and the top active institution was University of KwaZulu-Natal (n = 165) and the top journal was Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice (n = 20). Findings from this study reveal that the quantity of research on diabetes has significantly increased over the decade, and the outcomes of this scientific progress can guide future research and substantially provide the basic needs for improving management procedures for diabetes in the country.

Publication trends in research on particulate matter and health impact over a 10-year period: 2009-2018

Exposure to ambient particulate matter is a major health risk factor for numerous diseases, including those of the cardiovascular and respiratory varieties. The aim of this study was to estimate the latest global research activities regarding particulate matter and health impact. We performed a bibliometric analysis of this field's scientific publication trends over a decade (2009-2018). Publications were retrieved from the Scopus and Web of Science databases using the search terms "particulate matter," "fine particulate matter," "health impact," and their synonyms. The literature on health impact in the research fields of particulate matter (PM10) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) trended to significantly increase over the decade in consideration. It appears to have been led by researchers of the United States and China. Worldwide research on particulate matter and health effects has focused primarily on respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The precursors to and components of particulate matter (such as nitrogen dioxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, sulfur dioxide, and black carbon) were also popular research topics in this field. Research on children, older adults, and pregnant women, who are most vulnerable to the health effects of air pollution, has increased dramatically over the past 10 years. Our findings provide the information necessary to predict unmet research topics and future research needs.

Global research trends in complex oral sensitivity disorder: A systematic bibliometric analysis of the framework

OBJECTIVES

A systematic bibliometric analysis was performed to investigate trends in complex oral sensitivity disorder (COSD) research worldwide and compare the contributions of different countries/institutions, scientific journals, authors, keywords, and citations.

METHODS

Web of Science database from 1985 to 2018 was systematically searched to identify all relevant articles using the MeSH terms "complex oral sensitivity disorder" and all synonyms used in the literature. We included original articles, review articles, letters to the editor, and book chapters in the English language and in 27 different ISI categories of medical sciences. Several bibliometric indicators were used.

RESULTS

We identified 10 633 articles, of which only 3349 were eligible with only 443 being included for quantitative analyses. The annual percentage growth rate for article publication was 9.16 fractionalized articles with the most productive countries (reported only in 428 out of 443 articles) being Italy (n = 66, 15.42%) followed by USA (n = 61, 14.25%) and with Italy achieving the greatest number of citations (n = 1415). Similarly, the most productive institution for article publication was the University of Turku, Finland, with 39 (8.8%) published articles. Among the top 20 departments, 15 were affiliated with dental institutions. The most productive source was "Journal of Oral Pathology and Medicine" with 38 (8.58%) articles, whereas the most productive author was "Lopez-Jornet P" with 19 articles (6.52 fractionalized articles).

CONCLUSIONS

There is an increasing trend for publications on COSD. Collaboration among different countries must improve in order to implement research on this disorder, which seems to be mainly a condition for the dental discipline.

Trends and characteristics of global medical informatics conferences from 2007 to 2017: A bibliometric comparison of conference publications from Chinese, American, European and the Global Conferences

BACKGROUND

As the second-largest economy in the world, China has invested considerable financial and policy support into hospital informatization since health care reform in 2010. However, the results and experience of such investments have not been compared with relevant research and applications in the United States and Europe.

OBJECTIVES

From the perspective of professional conference proceedings, we comparatively analyzed the current situations, characteristics, hotspots, and trends of medical informatics (MI) development in China, the United States and Europe to help Chinese MI researchers and practitioners summarize their experiences and determine gaps compared to their American and European peers. We also aimed to educate foreign peers about the special contributions of the China MI circle and facilitate multilevel international cooperation.

METHODS

English conference proceedings of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium (USA), Medical Informatics Europe (MIE, Europe) and World Conference on Medical Informatics (MEDINFO, Global) from 2007 to 2017 were searched within Scopus and Pubmed. Proceedings of Chinese MI conferences (CMIAAS, CHINC, CHITEC, CPMI) (China) were searched within Chinese databases CQVIP, CNKI and WanFang during the same period. The datasets were preprocessed via a Natural Language Processing (NLP) package on Python and were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed via bibliometric methods.

RESULTS

Overall, 2285, 1601, 1930 and 5431 papers were publicized from the AMIA Symposium (USA), MIE (Europe), MEDINFO (Global) and Chinese MI conferences (China) between 2007 and 2017, respectively, with an H-index of 32, 19, 19 and 3, respectively. The AMIA Symposium, MIE and MEDINFO received submissions from 43, 68 and 80 countries (or regions), respectively, but Chinese MI conferences (CMIAAS, CHINC, CHITEC, CPMI) only received submissions from 3 foreign countries. Author affiliations were quite similar among the AMIA Symposium, MIE and MEDINFO, as 67%, 75% and 70% of authors came from universities/colleges, respectively; 18%, 10% and 11% came from medical institutions, respectively; and 7%, 8% and 10% came from institutes, respectively. In contrast, the majority (54%) of authors in Chinese MI conferences came from medical institutions followed by universities/colleges (17%) and institutes (10%). Of the top 5 authors with the most publications in AMIA Symposium, MIE and MEDINFO, 14/15 of them had medical backgrounds, but only one author from the Chinese MI conferences majored in medicine. Electronic medical records (EMR) were included in the top 10 high-frequency keywords by all four conference groups, but the amount of time that this keyword appeared differed in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

The MI annual conferences are all different among China, the United States and Europe. China lags in the theoretical and discipline bases but has made considerable investments in the past 10 years. China should fully use its second-mover advantage and application advantages and utilize international experiences and cooperation to make stronger contributions to global MI development.

A Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Supported Ionic Liquid Membranes during the 1995-2015 Period: Study of the Main Applications and Trending Topics

A bibliometric analysis based on Scopus database was performed to identify the global research trends related to Supported Ionic Liquid Membranes (SILMs) during the time period from 1995 to 2015. This work tries to improve the understanding of the most relevant research topics and applications. The results from the analysis reveal that only after 2005 the research efforts focused on SILMs became significant, since the references found before that year are scarce. The most important research works on the four main application groups for SILMs defined in this work (carbon dioxide separation, other gas phase separations, pervaporation and liquid phase separations) were summarized in this paper. Carbon dioxide separation appeared as the application that has received by far the most attention according to the research trends during the analysed period. Comments about other significant applications that are gaining attention, such as the employment of SILMs in analytical tasks or their consideration for the production of fuel cells, have been included.

Publication trends of research on diabetes mellitus and T cells (1997-2016): A 20-year bibliometric study

Introduction

Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is a huge burden for human health. Recent studies show the close relationship between DM and T cells. We investigated the trend in DM and T cells research.

Methods

Using the Web of Science database, we searched the publications on DM and T cells in 1997–2016, and studied the source data using bibliometric methodology. Excel 2016, GraphPad Prism 5, and VOSviewer software were used to analyze the publication trend in DM and T cells research.

Results

We found a total of 1077 publications with 38109 citations up to January 23, 2017. The highest contribution came from the United States, with 48.38% of the publications, 61.44% of the citations and the highest H-index (74). China had the 5th place for total publications, but ranked 11th both for citation frequency (604) and H-index (13). The inflection point of the global DM and T cells publications was in 2000. Journal of Immunology published the most related articles (164). Santamaria P. was the leading scholar in this field with the most publications (35). The keywords “regulatory T cell” and “autoimmune diabetes” were mentioned more than 300 times. Furthermore, type 2 (T2)DM, T cell immunoglobulin and mucin domain (TIM) and obesity are becoming popular research topics in this field.

Conclusion

The quantity of publications on DM and T cells grew rapidly around year 2000, but has relatively decreased recently. The United States had the leading position in global research. There was a discrepancy between productivity and quality of publications from China. Latest progress is most likely first published by the Journal of Immunology. Santamaria P., Roep B.O. and Peakman M. were the pioneer scholars in this field. Most researchers have focused on “regulatory T cell” and “autoimmune diabetes” research. In future, T2DM, TIM and obesity may be the popular areas.