A bibliometric study of scientific literature on obesity research in PubMed (1988-2007)

This article describes a bibliometric review of the publications on obesity research in PubMed over the last 20 years. We used Medline via the PubMed online service of the US National Library of Medicine from 1988 to 2007. The search strategy was: ([obesity] in MesH). A total of 58,325 references were retrieved, 25.5% in 1988-1997, and 74.5% in 1998-2007. The growth in the number of publications showed an exponential increase. The references were published in 3613 different journals, with 20 journals contributing 25% of obesity literature. The two journals contributing most were the International Journal of Obesity (5.1%), Obesity-Obesity Research (2.9%). North America and Europe were the most productive world areas with 44.1% and 37.9% of the literature, respectively. The US was the predominant country in number of publications, followed by the United Kingdom, Japan and Italy. The ranking of production changed when the number of publications was normalized by population, gross domestic product and obesity prevalence by countries. The great increase of publications on obesity during the period 1988-2007 was particularly evident in the second decade of the period which is concordant with the worldwide obesity epidemic. USA and Europe were leaders in the production of scientific articles on obesity.