Research on Withania somnifera (Ashwaganda): A Scientometric Assessment of Global Publications Output during 1995-2018

The present study examined 2008 global publications on Withania somnifera, as indexed and covered in international Scopus database during 1995-2018, with a view to understand their publications growth rate, global publication share, citation impact, share of their international collaborative publications, distribution of publications by broad subjects, productivity and citation profile of top organizations and authors, preferred media of com munication and bibliographic characteristics of high cited publications. The global publications registered 18.31% annual average growth rate and its citation impact averaged to 18.55 citations per publication. The global share of top 10 countries ranged from 1.34% to 70.42%, with the largest share (70.42%) from India, followed by USA (11.35%) and other 8 countries from 1.34% to 4.03%. More than 100% of the cumulative global publication and citation share comes from top 10 countries during 1995-18. Only four coun tries among top 10 registered relative citation index above the world aver age of 1.0: U.K. (2.48), USA (1.80), Germany (1.69) and South Korea (1.08) during 1995-18. Pharmacology, toxicology and pharmaceutics contributed the largest global publications share of 42.33%, followed biochemistry, ge netics and molecular biology (32.42%), medicine (30.73%), agricultural & biological sciences (25.45%), etc. during 1995-18. 377 global organizations and 422 global authors participated in global Withania somnifera research, of which the 15 most productive global organizations and authors together contributed 25.65% and 14.59% global publication share and 32.31% and 23.82% global citation share respectively during 1995-2018. Amongst 1964 journal publications (in 313 journals) in global Withania somnifera research, the top 15 most productive journals together contributed 21.49% global share of total journal publication output during 1995-2018. Sixty Eight (68) publications were found to be high cited, as they registered citations from 100 to 601 during 1995-2018 and they together received 11582 citations, averaging to 170.32 citations per publication.