Scientific authorships and collaboration network analysis on Chagas disease: papers indexed in PubMed (1940-2009)

Abstract

SUMMARYChagas disease is a chronic, tropical, parasitic disease, endemic throughout Latin America. The large-scale migration of populations has increased the geographic distribution of the disease and cases have been observed in many other countries around the world. To strengthen the critical mass of knowledge generated in different countries, it is essential to promote cooperative and translational research initiatives. We analyzed authorship of scientific documents on Chagas disease indexed in the Medline database from 1940 to 2009. Bibliometrics was used to analyze the evolution of collaboration patterns. A Social Network Analysis was carried out to identify the main research groups in the area by applying clustering methods. We then analyzed 13,989 papers produced by 21,350 authors. Collaboration among authors dramatically increased over the study period, reaching an average of 6.2 authors per paper in the last five-year period. Applying a threshold of collaboration of five or more papers signed in co-authorship, we identified 148 consolidated research groups made up of 1,750 authors. The Chagas disease network identified constitutes a "small world," characterized by a high degree of clustering and a notably high number of Brazilian researchers.

Evolution of coauthorship networks: worldwide scientific production on leishmaniasis

“…Keiser and Utzinger 11 identifi ed a signifi cant increase in the average number of authors per paper in publications on tropical medicine between 1952 and 2002, a rise which has continued to the present day. This general trend also applies to specifi c tropical diseases, such as Chagas disease 13 . The present study, in addition to confi rming this same trend in relation to leishmaniasis, has allowed us to describe other aspects of the scientifi c collaboration in the fi eld, such as the fact that in last several decades, the number of different people with whom researchers collaborate has signifi cantly increased.…”

Análisis bibliométrico de la producción científica española en Enfermedades Infecciosas y en Microbiología

“…Así, el incremento de las inversiones destinadas a I + D 29 en el campo de la biomedicina -pese a que se hayan quedado todavía muy por debajo de los niveles de los países de mayor desarrollo científico-y la mayor preparación de nuestros investigadores -fomentada mediante programas de promoción de la investigación y formación de personalhan resultado esenciales y han propiciado el desarrollo de diferentes grupos 29-31 y líneas de investigación con capacidad de liderazgo internacional 13,27,32 . En relación con la colaboración entre instituciones, el hecho de que la base de datos de la WOS recoja la dirección institucional de todos los autores firmantes permite conocer con precisión el grado de colaboración entre centros nacionales y extranjeros.…”

Social network analysis of Iranian researchers on emergency medicine: a sociogram analysis

“…To demonstrate connections among the authors in a network, we applied SNA as the main available and possible methodology4 to show components, structure holes (gaps in interactions), authors’ roles including hubs as active authors, cut-points as main network connectors, and gatekeepers as connection accelerators.…”

“…SNA studies apply such thresholds to focus the analysis on the most intense links, thus enabling a suitable visualisation and representation of the network 4. As a result, we designed a new cit-file and made coc-file based on this file.…”