Do national funding organizations properly address the diseases with the highest burden?: Observations from China and the UK

Measuring the impact of health research data in terms of data citations by scientific publications

Health is a representative domain data-driven research since health research data are growingly generated at a massive scale. There is an intuitive logic that the degree to which disease burden and the number of data resources align. In order to figure out disease-specific data sharing and reuse level, we took the number of data records and their citations in the scientific literature in the Data Citation Index platform as approximate indicators. The results indicated that only a small percentage (7.5%) of health data records had received documented citations by scientific publications. We find the level of data sharing and reuse varies across diseases. Our study suggested that the more socioeconomic burden and the more research funding, the more likely scientific data for diseases will be produced and made available. But such a correlation could not be observed for the activity of data reuse. Secondary reuse of scientific data is a complex behavior.

How does academia respond to the burden of infectious and parasitic disease?

Background

Academic research is one of the main avenues through which humans can fight the threat of infectious diseases. However, there have been concerns regarding whether the academic system has provided sufficient efforts to fight infectious diseases we potentially face. Answering these questions could contribute to evidence-based recommendations for setting research priorities and third-mission policies.

Methods

With a focus on one of the most common categories of communicable diseases, infectious and parasitic diseases (IPDs), we searched Web of Science for articles and reviews relevant to IPDs published during the period 2000–2019 and retrieved WHO data on disease burden in corresponding years. The academic response patterns were explored by IPD subcategory and by human development level (an index established by the United Nations). We conduct the analysis in particular to gain insight into the dynamic relationship between disease burden and research effort on IPDs, scientific efforts contributed by countries with different development levels, and the variation trends in international joint efforts.

Results

The greatest burden of IPDs is clustered in the developing regions of Africa, but has received academic response from both developed and developing countries. Highly developed countries dominate the ranks of academic research in this area, yet there is also a clear increase in research efforts from the countries most affected, despite their low human development scale. In fact, the overall analysis reveals an improved capability for addressing local problems from African regions. In terms of international collaboration, highly developed countries such as the United States and United Kingdom have commonly collaborated with needy regions, whereas prolific but developing nations, like China, have not.

Conclusions

From a global perspective, academia has positively responded to health needs caused by IPDs. Although the relevant research output contribution is primarily from the highly developed countries, concentrated and specialized efforts from the undeveloped regions to ease their local burden can be clearly observed. Our findings also indicate a tendency to focus more on local health needs for both developed and undeveloped regions. The insights revealed in this study should benefit a more informed and systemic plan of research priorities.

How has academia responded to the urgent needs created by COVID-19? A multi-level global, regional and national analysis

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, gaining insights into how academia has responded to this urgent challenge is of great significance. This article presents academic response patterns at a global, regional and national level from an analysis of publication volume versus reported cases of COVID-19, scientific collaboration and research focus. We also compare academic activity associated with this newly emerging infection to that related to long-standing infections. Our results show that the research community has responded quickly to COVID-19. The highly developed countries, which have the highest number of confirmed cases, are also the major academic contributors. National-level analysis reveals diverse response patterns from different countries. Specifically, academic research in the United Kingdom remained at a relatively constant level throughout the whole year (2020), while the global share of China’s research output was prone to shift as its domestic pandemic status changed. Strong alliances have formed among countries with academic capabilities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The distribution of disciplines is relatively decentralised, indicating that a diverse and broad knowledge base contributes to the COVID-19 literature. Most of the analysed countries show dynamic patterns of research focus that vary over time as the pandemic evolves, except India. As one of the world’s biggest suppliers of vaccines, India makes consistent efforts on vaccine research, especially those related to pharmaceutical preparations. Our findings may serve as resources for fostering strategies to respond to future threats of pandemics.

The Prediction of Infectious Diseases: A Bibliometric Analysis

OBJECTIVE

The outbreak of infectious diseases has a negative influence on public health and the economy. The prediction of infectious diseases can effectively control large-scale outbreaks and reduce transmission of epidemics in rapid response to serious public health events. Therefore, experts and scholars are increasingly concerned with the prediction of infectious diseases. However, a knowledge mapping analysis of literature regarding the prediction of infectious diseases using rigorous bibliometric tools, which are supposed to offer further knowledge structure and distribution, has been conducted infrequently. Therefore, we implement a bibliometric analysis about the prediction of infectious diseases to objectively analyze the current status and research hotspots, in order to provide a reference for related researchers.

METHODS

We viewed "infectious disease*" and "prediction" or "forecasting" as search theme in the core collection of Web of Science from inception to 1 May 2020. We used two effective bibliometric tools, i.e., CiteSpace (Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA) and VOSviewer (Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands) to objectively analyze the data of the prediction of infectious disease domain based on related publications, which can be downloaded from the core collection of Web of Science. Then, the leading publications of the prediction of infectious diseases were identified to detect the historical progress based on collaboration analysis, co-citation analysis, and co-occurrence analysis.

RESULTS

1880 documents that met the inclusion criteria were extracted from Web of Science in this study. The number of documents exhibited a growing trend, which can be expressed an increasing number of experts and scholars paying attention to the field year by year. These publications were published in 427 different journals with 11 different document types, and the most frequently studied types were articles 1618 (83%). In addition, as the most productive country, the United States has provided a lot of scientific research achievements in the field of infectious diseases.

CONCLUSION

Our study provides a systematic and objective view of the field, which can be useful for readers to evaluate the characteristics of publications involving the prediction of infectious diseases and for policymakers to take timely scientific responses.