Pediatric type 1 diabetes research in the 21st century: a scientometric review

Abstract

Introduction: Scientometric studies help scientists to identify research gaps and plan future research. There is no scientometric assessment of research on childhood onset type 1 diabetes (T1D), despite an intensive research in this field over the past 2 decades.

Aim of the study: To provide a scientometric assessment of global research output in pediatric T1D.

Material and methods: Publications on pediatric T1D indexed in Scopus database over the 20-year period from 2000 to 2019 were examined. The most productive and impactful countries, organizations and authors, trends in research, the media of publications and characteristics of high cited publications were identified using appropriate bibliographic tools.

Results: Pediatric T1D research registered 7.84% and 79.99% annual and 10-year cumulative growth and averaged 19.35 citations per paper (CPP). The field witnessed an uneven participation of 141 countries, wherein 82.67% of the global research output share came from top 10 countries. USA leads the ranking with 29.76% share, followed by UK (10.56%), Germany, Italy, Sweden and Australia (5.15% to 7.88%), and Poland, Finland, Canada and Denmark (3.04% to 4.24%). Five countries which registered relative citation index (RCI) higher than their group average of 1.63 were Finland (2.30), UK (1.82), Canada (1.77), Denmark and USA (1.74 each). The number of participating organizations and authors was 3627 and 5596 respectively.

Conclusions: The USA and Finland are the most productive and the most impactful countries respectively in global pediatric T1D research. The contribution from developing countries especially from Southeast Asia is meager despite a large disease burden.

Keywords: bibliometrics; global publications; scientometrics; type 1 diabetes; children.