Scientometric analysis and mapping of scientific articles on Behcet's disease

Behçet's disease (BD) is a systemic vasculitis disease with oral and genital aphthous ulceration, uveitis, skin manifestations, arthritis and neurological involvement. Many investigators have published articles on BD in the last two decades since introduction of diagnosis criteria by the International Study Group for Behçet's Disease in 1990. However, there is no scientometric analysis available for this increasing amount of literature.

A scientometric analysis method was used to achieve a view of scientific articles about BD which were published between 1990 and 2010, by data retrieving from ISI Web of Science. The specific features such as publication year, language of article, geographical distribution, main journal in this field, institutional affiliation and citation characteristics were retrieved and analyzed. International collaboration was analyzed using Intcoll and Pajek softwares.

There was a growing trend in the number of BD articles from 1990 to 2010. The number of citations to BD literature also increased around 5.5-fold in this period. The countries found to have the highest output were Turkey, Japan, the USA and England; the first two universities were from Turkey. Most of the top 10 journals publishing BD articles were in the field of rheumatology, consistent with the subject areas of the articles. There was a correlation between the citations per paper and the impact factor of the publishing journal.

This is the first scientometric analysis of BD, showing the scientometric characteristics of ISI publications on BD.