Highly cited tropical medicine articles in the Web of Science from 1991 to 2020: A bibliometric analysis

An adequate response to health needs to include the identification of research patterns about the large number of people living in the tropics and subjected to tropical diseases. Studies have shown that research does not always match the real needs of those populations, and that citation reflects mostly the amount of money behind particular publications. Here we test the hypothesis that research from richer institutions is published in better-indexed journals, and thus has greater citation rates.

The data in this study were extracted from the Science Citation Index Expanded database; the 2020 journal Impact Factor (IF2020) was updated to 30 June 2021. We considered places, subjects, institutions and journals.

We identified 1041 highly cited articles with ≥100 citations in the category of tropical medicine. About a decade is needed for an article to reach peak citation. Only two COVID-19-related articles were highly cited in the last 3 y. The most cited articles were published by the journals Memorias Do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz (Brazil), Acta Tropica (Switzerland) and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (USA). The USA dominated five of the six publication indicators. International collaboration articles had more citations than single-country articles. The UK, South Africa and Switzerland had high citation rates, as did the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the USA and the WHO in Switzerland.

About 10 y of accumulated citations is needed to achieve ≥100 citations as highly cited articles in the Web of Science category of tropical medicine. Six publication and citation indicators, including authors' publication potential and characteristics evaluated by Y-index, indicate that the currently available indexing system places tropical researchers at a disadvantage against their colleagues in temperate countries, and suggest that, to progress towards better control of tropical diseases, international collaboration should increase, and other tropical countries should follow the example of Brazil, which provides significant financing to its scientific community.