Bibliometric Analysis on Tuberculosis and Tuberculosis-Related Research Trends in Africa: A Decade-Long Study

Abstract

Tuberculosis is one of the oldest known diseases and the leading communicable cause of deaths worldwide. Although several studies have been carried out on tuberculosis, no research has examined the publication trends in this area. Hence, this study aimed to fill the gap by conducting a bibliometric study in publications trends on tuberculosis and tuberculosis-related studies in Africa from 2010–2019 and explore the hotspots. Information in published documents on tuberculosis and its related studies from 2010 to 2019 were retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) database. The bibliometric tool biblioshiny and Microsoft Excel 2016 were used to analyse the top leading journals, top cited documents, authors’ country production, country collaboration networks, most relevant authors, authors’ impacts, most relevant authors by corresponding author, most cited countries, university collaborations, most relevant affiliations, conceptual structural maps, title word co-occurrence networks, collaboration and significance of individual sources, university, country and keyword relations. A total of 3945 published documents were retrieved. The analyses showed that European Respiratory Journal was the leading journal in publications on tuberculosis studies with a total of 452 published articles, the WHO 2012 report was the most cited document with 2485 total citations while South Africa was the most productive country in tuberculosis publications as well as the leading country with the highest co-authorship collaboration. Analysis of top relevant authors revealed that Anonymous (133) and Dheda (44) were the two topmost relevant authors of tuberculosis publications, South Africa was the most relevant country by corresponding authors and the topmost cited country for tuberculosis publications. Furthermore, analysis of the university collaborations network showed that the University of Cape Town was the topmost university in Africa with the highest collaboration network, tuberculosis as a word had the highest co-occurrence network while the Three Field Plot diagram revealed the relations between universities, keywords and countries. This study provides a quantitative and qualitative analyses of the leading journals, most cited published articles, title word occurrences, and most relevant authors in published documents on tuberculosis and tuberculosis related studies from 2010–2019.

A scientometric study on quantitative microbial risk assessment in water quality analysis across 6 years (2016–2021)

“…The country and institutional analysis of publication activity on the search query showed a high output for developed countries compared to developing ones. European countries, China and USA showed high productivity, which is associated with their high economic potential, research infrastructure and high ability to collaborate with others as Igwaran & Edoamodu (2021) established in a study using bibliometric analyses. High publication output could also be affiliated to great awareness on the need to conserve the quality of water and integrity of water resources considering its finite nature and the deteriorating quality, quantity and safety of such resources in an era of climate change and increased pollution globally (Boehm & Soller 2020).…”

“…The selection of journal articles exclusively for this analysis was due to their dominance and by virtue of them undergoing peer-review hence having credible information. Existent bibliometric studies have applied this logic citing that journal articles are more reliable to use owing to thorough scrutiny of their data and information during peer-review processes (Cordoso et al 2020;Sweileh 2020;Igwaran & Edoamodu 2021;Mbogning et al 2021). On the basis of language, a majority of the searched articles were published in English (1,007; 99.4%), while other minority languages included Spanish at 0.3% (three articles), German, Polish and Portuguese at 0.1% each (one article).…”

A bibliometric analysis of global research performance on tuberculosis (2011–2020): Time for a global approach to support high-burden countries

“…Furthermore, a study by Igwaran and Edoamodu, on research trends in Africa also showed the University of Cape Town as the most common affiliation, thus supporting our findings. [ 19 ] Of the top eight high-burden countries, only South Africa, China, and India were present in the top 20 institutional affiliations. The remaining high-burden countries need to conduct more TB research in their institutions.…”

“…The study by Nafade et al ., in 2018 analyzed global trends of research before 2016, and the analysis by Igwaran and Edoamodu only targeted Africa; another by Morishita et al ., targeted the Western Pacific. [ 19 20 21 ] A study with a global aspect was, therefore, necessary. This study aimed to perform a bibliometric analysis of TB research from 2011 to 2020 to discover research performance and trends from a global perspective.…”

Root Canal Disinfection Articles with the Highest Relative Citation Ratios. A Bibliometric Analysis from 1990 to 2019

“…Bibliometric analysis may be used by researchers to examine and assess publications on medical research, including fields such as infectious diseases [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ] or dentistry [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ]. In recent years, endodontics has also been the object of Scientometric and/or bibliometric studies, analyzing scientific output globally [ 22 ], or in a specific field, such as regenerative endodontics [ 23 ], micro-CT [ 24 ], or vital pulp therapy [ 25 ].…”