Highly cited articles in malaria research: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reveal the bibliometric characteristics of highly cited articles in Malaria research for the period of 1991-2015. Design/methodology/approach The data of highly cited articles for the period of 1991 to 2015 were extracted from the Science Citation Index Expended of Web of Science. The keyword “Malaria” was used as topic term to search documents that contained this word in the title or keyword or abstract of the documents that published in 1991 to 2015. A total of 1,614 articles having TC2015 = 100 were retrieved as highly cited articles for further analysis, and Microsoft excel was used for the analysis purpose. Findings A total of 1,614 of highly cited articles were published in the 230 journals for the period of 1991 to 2015, and majority of the articles were appeared in journals that have top impact factor. The articles published in the 2011s have greater average citations and authors per article. Six journals have produced almost a quarter of highly cited articles and remaining articles were published in 224 journals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA was the most productive journal with 154 articles, which accounts for 9.53 per cent of the total articles, followed by Lancet (110; 6.81 per cent). We found degree collaboration value of 0.971 for the articles, which indicates the clear dominance of multiple authors in publication of highly cited articles in Malaria research. In this study, new indictor called P index was applied for the evaluation of the author’s productivity. As per the p-value, the White, NJ has emerged as the most productive author with the p-value of 0.41 (61 articles), followed by Marsh, K (p = 0.33), Nosten, F (p = 0.32) and Snow, RW (p = 0.31). The USA and the UK were the most productive countries. The article entitled as “Global and regional burden of disease and risk factors, 2001: systematic analysis of population health data” contributed by Lopez et al. (2006) was the most cited article with 2,245 citations in 2015. Research limitations/implications The data for the present study was limited to the publications that indexed in Science Citation index Expended of Web of Science. Originality/value This paper would be useful to the researchers to know the trends and achievements in the Malaria research and also to the library and information science professionals in collection building process.

The 100 most-cited articles on malaria: a bibliometric analysis

“…Manuscripts are often published in high-quality journals reflecting the importance of these works in the scientific and clinical communities (Wrafter et al , 2016). Our result is in line with the findings of other studies (Bakri et al , 2017; Bornmann and Leydesdorff, 2015; Gupta and Bala, 2011; Kolle et al , 2017; Iqbal et al , 2019; Martin-Del-Rio et al , 2018; Powell et al , 2016; Tarazona et al , 2018; Wrafter et al , 2016; Zhou et al , 2017). This could be because the authorship of journals with high impact factors are often researchers or the editors of these journals accept articles with a high potential of receiving citations.…”

“…The USA has published most of the influential articles; this is the finding which is consistent with that of previous studies. Many studies have reported that the USA is the leading country in science production in the domain of medicine and health (Adnan and Ullah, 2018; Bakri et al , 2017; Ellul et al , 2017; Garg et al , 2009; Gu et al , 2015; Kolle et al , 2017; Kolkailah et al , 2019; Martin-Del-Rio et al , 2018; Ozbilgin et al , 2017; Ranson and Lissenden, 2016; Saquib et al , 2017; Tarazona et al , 2018; Van Eijk et al , 2012; Wrafter et al , 2016;). Research activity is dependent on the number of scholars and academics, as well as on the volume of funding available for research (Sweileh et al , 2016).…”

“…Based on the World Health Organization (WHO) report, approximately US$2.7bn are spent worldwide for malaria control. Moreover, in 2016, US$588m was spent in this area, representing 85% of the estimated annual need for research and development; however, the disease has not been eradicated, and there have been concerns about its distribution and strength in recent years (Kolle et al , 2017). Therefore, with the high burden of malaria disease, it is necessary to make the effort to control the incidence and prevalence of malaria (Feachem et al , 2019).…”

“…Monitoring the most-cited articles in a certain subject demonstrates the orientation of global research and manifests the information gaps in a topic. In other words, it clearly delineates the pattern of studies to direct future research (Kolle et al , 2017). Bibliometric analysis can offer a general and quantitative overview of a specific topic with a vast background.…”

A Scientometric Study of Neurocomputing Publications (1992–2018): An Aerial Overview of Intrinsic Structure

“…Scientometrics therefore gives an aerial view of scientific activity. It basically is a part of library and information science, but it has been judiciously used in numerous other research areas like management [3,4], energy & fuels [5,6], psychology [7,8], Dielectric and bioimpedance research [9], Selfish memes [10], and so on. Bibliometric study is not only celebrated in the field of computer science but is also finding increasing attention in domains such as decision support systems [11,12], bioinformatics [13,14], heuristics [15], big data [16][17][18], and software engineering [19].…”