A bibliometric study of the movement disorder field by analyzing classic citation data on publication

Background: The extent to which a publication attracts scientific attention by virtue of its focus, provides clues about the trend and volume of scientific production in a particular field. Bibliometric analysis is a method to quantify aspects of a specific research area. This article focused on publication on the movement disorders. Methods: The bibliometric data on movement disorder were retrieved in relation to set of keywords from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WOS) available by January 2017. As many bibliometric statistics, such as citation indexes change during time, it was decided to compare two successive 5-years periods, 2007-2011 and 2012-2016. In addition, the citation classics publications with more than 100 times cited were taken into consideration. Results: In total, the number of movement disorder papers rose from 49,444 to 61,942. Clinical neurology was the most studied WOS subfield at 35.6%. About 12.0% of these studies were published by the Movement Disorders Journal. Original papers accounted for 63.7% of publications. The United States of America was the leading country as the source of these publications followed by China. University College London (UCL) was associated more than any other university regarding these publications whereas the National Institute of Health (NIH) was the major source of funding. The number of papers with more than 100 citations totaled 87, out of which only one paper had more than 400 citations. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that the total number of publications in movement disorders has increased remarkably during the past decade.