A bibliometric profile of lymphatic filariasis research in India

Tropical and vector borne diseases have always been a challenge for the medical science and society and exerted high impact on society in terms of financial, economical and psychological relevance. Lymphatic filariasis (LF) is one of the tropical diseases which is prevalent in under developing and developed countries. The objective of this study is to analyze the literature published in the area of filariasis research. The focus is to see the Indian contribution and its impact in terms of global publication and share, citation analysis and its impact, productive Indian institutions engaged in filariasis research and their impact, international collaborative research, productive journals, and highly cited papers published by Indian authors.

The data for this study was obtained from Scopus, a multidisciplinary database, for the period of forty years (1973-2012) using key words lymphatic filariasis, elephantiasis, Wuchereria bancrofti, Brugia malayi and Brugia timori available in the title, abstract and key words fields. The citation count has been taken as the number of citations scored by the papers since their publication. The international collaboration by Indian authors in filariasis research has been manually analyzed through author's affiliation field.

The search strategy using key words yielded 13,598 articles on different aspects of filariasis published during the forty years period. Indian authors have published 1970 articles which is 14.49% of global share, making it second highest productive country on filariasis research. United States holds first rank with 2956 articles (21.74% share). In terms of citation count, Indian research have quite good impact and has been ranked third; and in terms of average citation per paper it is far behind, while Ghana and Nigeria holds top two ranks.

There have been continued efforts in providing better facilities for research, though Indian filariasis research has to go long way in order to remove the incidence of the disease from Indian population and the results presented through this study shall be helpful for stakeholders in framing policies in this direction.