Publications on tuberculosis in developing and developed countries: a quantitative analysis
by
R. Elangovan
Department of Statistics, Annamalai University
Coauthors: M. Shanmugham

Globally, there is rapid growth of publications on Tuberculosis in the past four decades. These literatures are addressing and helping the TB health personnel to respond to the present and future challenges of TB. This study aims to determine the pattern and trend of TB publications in the last four decades by bibliometric analysis. The MEDLINE Database was used to retrieve articles on TUBERCULOSIS in the MESH fields(i.e. directly related to the articles) for the period 1966 to 2001/06 through SPIRS search Engine. A specialized software package was developed by the author using Fox Pro( ver 2.5). Various fields like Author, Country of Publications, Language, Publication Type, Year, MEdical Subject Headings (MESH) etc., were searched and stored in a text file. All the Text file contents were then merged in to a single database file, using this detailed analysis was done. Total of 72,390 articles in TUBERCULOSIS were processed. The number of TB articles available in the year 1963 was 16 only. This has abruptly raised to 1648 in the year 1965. The analysis shows that from 1966-1974 the trend has been oscillating between 2336 to 2912. In 1975, this has decreased to 1940 articles and then after it steadily decreases until the year 1994. Since then articles steadily increases till the year 2001. This has also been reflected on the publications of the developing countries. Based on the individual Journal names there were 72,390 TB articles published in 3669 Journals. These journals are from 94 countries in 38 languages. By language categorization maximum articles were published in English (35,417 articles i.e 49%), English-French(52), English-Italian (4), English-Portuguese and English-Spanish. The remaining were in Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Czech, Chines, Finnish, French, Germany etc in 36 Non English Journals. Most of these are from developed countries. Considering the Journal factor, among 3,669 journals, the highest number of articles were from Probl-Tuberk (USSR,7614 articles i.e. 10.52%) followed by Kekkakku(Japan, 1914, i.e.2.61%), both of which are Non English Journals and then by Am-Rev-Respir-Dis published in English. 72,390 articles were by published 94 countries. Of which developed countries like United States (15737), England (6372), Japan (4241), Italy (2349), Poland (2311), Germany West(1341), Germany East (1182), had highest publications from Tuberculosis. In the developing countries highest articles was from India (1975 articles). 61.21% of the TB articles were published by Journals from developed countries. The 39.61% of the Tuberculosis articles of the developing country published in developed country journals. Strangely only 21% of the developing country articles were published in the developing country journals. The total of 27,858 (38.48%) articles are published in the same country publications Journals. The study found that publications on Tuberculosis were steady some period and oscillating in some period though there is a significantly less contributions on developing country articles even from journals published from developing country. Much work is needed to increase the publications from these countries as they bear a great burden of TB cases globally. This paper presentation will discuss in detail about developing countries and developed countries to year-to-year, language, medical subject heading, publication type, authors address, country of publications, language factor and all other factors to identify the trend in these publications.

Date received: October 30, 2002

Copyright © 2002 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # cais-80.