The Depigmented Literature: A Holistic Analysis of Global Vitiligo Publications between 1975 and 2017

Vitiligo is a common depigmenting disorder with a prevalence of 0.5-2%. Despite the increasing popularity of bibliometric studies in recent years, medical literature lacks a report investigating bibliometric features of vitiligo literature.

It was aimed to analyze vitiligo literature by evaluating productivity of countries, institutions, and authors, and performing assessment of publication trends, bibliometric networks, and correlations.

We collected all data in this study by searching databases provided by Web of Science. All documents published on vitiligo literature between 1975 and 2017 were included. We performed correlation analyses between productivity and demographical and economical features of the countries publishing vitiligo articles.

A total of 7187 documents were detected and 72.2% of which was original article. The peak year for publication number by year was 2016 with 528 articles and the highest number of citations was reported in 2017. The USA was the leading country by total publication number (24.82%) followed by the United Kingdom (UK), India, China, and Italy (10.91%, 8.64%, 7.54%, and 6.87% respectively). Estonia was found to be the most productive country of vitiligo literature (13.01) followed by Netherlands, the UK, and Switzerland (12.64, 11.78, and 9.25, respectively). We found a high correlation between GDP per capita and the productivity of the countries (r = 0.732, P < 0.001).

As revealed in our study, although vitiligo occurs worldwide, developed countries dominated vitiligo literature. Researchers from developing and least-developed countries should be encouraged and supported to perform novel vitiligo studies.