Scientometric Assessment of Indian Publications on Hepatitis C during 2005–14

The study analyses the Indian research output consisting of 1014 papers on Hepatitis C during 2005–2014 on different parameters including its publication growth, citation impact, share of international collaborative papers and identification of major international collaborative partners, global rank and share of India amongst the top 20 most productive countries, productivity and citation impact of leading Indian institutes and authors, medium of communication in most productive journals. The Scopus bibliographical citation database has been used to download and retrieve the publication data on Hepatitis C for 10 years (2005–2014). The Indian research output on Hepatitis C witnessed an average annual growth rate of 30.18%, the average citation per paper of 7.71 (33.33%) of international collaborative publications and accounted for 1.86% share of global output during 2005–14. Medicine accounted for the largest publication share (61.0%) on Indian output on Hepatitis C during 2005–14, followed by biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology (16.10%), immunology & microbiology (9.37%), pharmacology, toxicology & pharmaceutics (9.15%), agricultural & biological sciences (2.57%) and chemistry (1.81%). The top 15 most productive organizations and authors together contributed 45.46% and 28.50% of the publication share and 28.50% and 53.75% citation share to the Indian publications output on Hepatitis C during the period. The authors suggest the need for evolving national plans for promoting awareness for the prevention of disease in hospitals and to prevent it from its turning intoan epidemic