Bibliometric Analysis of Palliative Care-Related Publication Trends During 2001 to 2016

The scientific contributions (publications) and international influence (citations) from authors providing the palliative care (PC)-related literature has a limited number of bibliometric reports. We aimed to analyze PC-related literature using the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science (WoS) database.

WoS database was used to retrieve publications with the following key words with title: "palliative care" OR "End of Life care" OR "terminal care.". The statistical analysis of the documents published during 2001 to 2016 was performed. The quantity and quality of research were assessed by the number of total publications and citation analysis. In addition, we also analyzed whether there were possible correlations between publication and socioeconomic factors.

The total research output was 6273 articles for PC. There was a 3-fold increase in the number of publications during the period and strong correlation between the year and number of PC-related publications ( R² = .96). The United States took a leading position in PC research (2448, 39.0%). The highest average citations was reported for the Norway (21.8). Australia had gained the highest productive ability in PC research (24.9 of articles per million populations). The annual impact factor rose progressively with time and increased 1.13 to 2.24 from 2003 to 2016. The number of publications correlated with gross domestic product ( r = .74; P < .001).

The United States and United Kingdom contributed most of the publications, but some East Asian countries also had a great performance. According to the socioeconomic factors, the publication capacity of top 20 countries is correlated with their economic scale.