Global Research Output on Kawasaki Disease: A Scientometric Assessment during 2005–14

The present paper attempts to study the performance of global research on Kawasaki disease using a series of bibliometric indicators. As seen from Scopus database the global research output cumulated to 2717 publications in 10 years during 2005–14, with annual average growth rate of 7.09% and citation impact per paper of 8.45. Around 68% of the global publications on Kawasaki disease were cited one or more times. The top 10 most productive countries together accounted for 74.35% share of the global output during 2005–14, with Canada registering the largest (2.44) relative citation index, followed by USA (1.79), Japan (1.47), France (1.45), Taiwan (1.36) and Italy (1.03) during 2005–14. Medicine contributed the largest publications share of 93.89%, followed by immunology & microbiology (10.78%), biochemistry, genetics & molecular biology (7.95%), pharmacology, toxicology & pharmaceutics (1.77%), neurosciences (1.18%) and agricultural & biological sciences (1.14%) during 2005–14. The top 21 and 20 most productive global organizations and authors together contributed 26.76% and 25.98% publication share and 58.55% and 83.44% citation share to the world publications and citation output on Kawasaki disease during 2005–14. The top 20 journals together accounted for 30.95% share of the total global publication output during 2005–14. There were 48 high cited papers, which received 60 or more citations and together received 5519 citations, registering the average citation per paper of 114.98 during 2005–14. The authors suggest the need for developing national policy and guidelines for diagnosis, treatment and management of Kawasaki disease patients.