Indian psoriasis research: An impact assessment through bibliometric studies

Psoriasis is a chronic skin disease and epidemiology shows its occurrences more in western countries than Africans or Asians. Different literature reviews have highlighted the prevalence of this disease world wide. The research and publishing trends in a given fi eld very often being described through bibliometric and citation studies, but in the field of psoriasis it has not been reported so far except some studies on dermatology. This study was aimed to analyze the patterns of publication in psoriasis research and highlight the impact of Indian psoriasis research over global scenario through citation analysis. The bibliographic data for this study has been obtained from Scopus database for the period of 1973-2012. The data has been retrieved using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) term ‘psoriasis’ available in title, abstract and keyword field and analyzed for Indian contribution. The citation count has been taken as the number of citations received by the papers since it has been published. This study shows that the Indian scientists have published 849 articles, which is 1.97% of global research output (42959 articles). United States of America (USA) is the most productive country. On the basis of quantitative publication output, India ranked 11th in global psoriasis research output. India has international collaboration with 17 countries and most of the collaboration came from USA. India is far behind in psoriasis research output in-spite prevalence of this disease in Indian population. There is a need of setting up of priorities and research facility in order to improve the better treatment facility and enhancing research output with better drug testing and administration.