Country Differences and Changes in Focus of Scientific Tobacco Control Publications between 2000 and 2012 in Europe

The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) stresses the importance of scientific research. We examined the differences between 31 European countries regarding quantity and focus of tobacco control research publications.

PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and PsycInfo were searched for peer-reviewed articles on tobacco, written by European authors, published between 2000 and 2012. For 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 we further identified the main focus of the publication.

The volume of European tobacco control scientific publications had almost doubled. Scandinavian countries had most publications per inhabitant, while Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia had relatively little research output. There was a smaller increase in publications about harm from tobacco, relative to publications about treatment, and education, and to publications about environmental interventions. In 2012, 49% of all publications were about health, while the total number of publications on environmental interventions was relatively small (10%).

Research output had almost doubled, in line with global trends, but is still unevenly distributed across Europe. Although we observed a shift in European publications away from the harm of tobacco towards protecting smokers and changing the environment, the field is still dominated by publications on smoking and health.