Open Innovation in Medical and Pharmaceutical Research: A Literature Landscape Analysis

Abstract

Open innovation in medical and pharmaceutical research has grown steadily over the last decade. However, the performance of the published literature in terms of the scientific impact and gaining social media attention remains largely unexplored. The scientific literature of open innovation was examined by means of bibliometric analyses to identify the most prolific authors, organizations, countries, journals, research areas, and recurring terms. By accessing the Web of Science Core Collection and Altmetric electronic databases, citation-related and Altmetric data were evaluated. Public-private partnerships and a selection of newly introduced potential novel drugs in the analyzed publications were identified. North America and Europe were the major literature contributors. Research outputs were mainly published in journals focused on business and economics, pharmacology and pharmacy, and engineering. Many pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies contributed to the analyzed publications, with higher mean citation counts and social media attention (Altmetric score) than nonindustry articles. Public-private partnerships fostered financial support, sharing of expertise and intellectual property, and research collaborations. In summary, open innovation might serve as a powerful strategy to both benefit the involved industry entities and accelerate the development of solutions and products for the betterment of human health.

Mapping Knowledge Structure and Research Frontiers of Ultrasound-Induced Blood-Brain Barrier Opening: A Scientometric Study

“…First, in contrast to other popular databases such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, or Embase, WOSCC is the most comprehensive and authoritative one across scientific disciplines (Chen et al, 2020 , 2021 ). Second, it is a typical citation database containing literature abstracts and other relevant data such as citation and research collaboration information, facilitating for scientometric analysis (Yeung et al, 2021 ). Last but most importantly, it could directly provide reference files that met the specific format requirements as dictated by scientometric software such as VOS viewer and CiteSpace.…”

“…VOS viewer software is a scientometric visualization tool developed by Professor Eck and Waltman from Leiden University in the Netherlands using the Java language, which could visualize the knowledge structure, regularity, and distribution of scientific publications (van-Eck and Waltman, 2010 ). It has been widely adopted for bibliometric analysis in a variety of scientific fields since its introduction (Wang et al, 2020 ; Yeung et al, 2021 ). In our study, the version of VOS viewer 1.6.16 (available at: http://vosviewer.com ) was used to perform country/institution citation analysis, journal/author/reference co-citation analysis, and keyword co-occurrence analysis, and related knowledge maps were constructed.…”

“…Different from systematic reviews, scientometric analysis is a quantitative method that combines information visualization technology and mathematical and statistical methods to evaluate the contributions of authors, institutions, countries, and journals in specific fields (Rizzi et al, 2021 ; Yeung et al, 2021 ). It primarily focuses on the metrological properties of literature, like publication numbers, citation frequency, and cooperative relationships, so that the researchers can identify core entities and development trends in a specific subject or research domain and provide new insights and directions for future research.…”

Current State and Future Directions of Intranasal Delivery Route for Central Nervous System Disorders: A Scientometric and Visualization Analysis

“…Unlike systematic reviews, scientometrics refers to the quantitative analysis of literature information using mathematical and statistical methods, and has been often used with the intention of identifying the overall knowledge framework, evaluating current status and predicting future directions within a given field ( Chen et al, 2014a ; De-Castilhos-Ghisi et al, 2020 ). Recently, several bibliometric visualization tools, like HistCite ( Garfield et al, 2006 ), VOS viewer ( van-Eck and Waltman, 2010 ), Citespace ( Synnestvedt et al, 2005 ), and RBibliometrix ( Ke et al, 2020 ), have been widely used in various disciplines of scientific research, including material science ( Caixeta et al, 2020 ), food industry ( Blázquez-Ruiz et al, 2016 ), ecology ( De-Castilhos-Ghisi et al, 2020 ), and biomedicine ( Chen et al, 2010 ; Deng et al, 2020 ; Yeung et al, 2021 ). Nevertheless, as far as we know, there are no prior reports on scientometric studies covering researches on intranasal delivery, regardless of a large body of published literature on this scientific area that can provide important references to promote further research in this field.…”

Digital Teaching in Medical Education: Scientific Literature Landscape Review

“…Thousands of scientific studies have explored different kinds of digital teaching applications in medical education. In this work, we aimed to gain insights into the tendencies and features of this scientific area by the application of a total scale bibliometric analysis, an approach that has proven its value in the characterization of diverse scientific areas with medical significance [19][20][21]. We also aimed to identify the most productive entities and reveal recurring terms from the current literature on digital teaching in medical education.…”