Mapping of breast cancer research in India: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

This study presents a bibliometric analysis of the scholastic output on breast cancer in India. The purpose is to provide an overview of the research activities in the country on the subject during the last ten years, exploring different aspects of scientific literature. Data on 3529 items, including 2945 articles and 584 reviews published during 1 January 2005 to 31 December 2014 were collected using Scopus. An advanced search was conducted in the database. The search results were filtered for English language, journals, India and the period under study. Lotka's law was applied to assess the author productivity and Bradford's law of scattering was used to ascertain the distribution pattern of articles in journals. Most (about 96%) contributions were found to be an outcome of collaborative authorship. Around 19.05% of the papers had collaboration of four authors and 16.53% appeared due to collective efforts of three authors each. Trend of an increasing number of articles published over the period has been observed. Author productivity did not fit the Lotka's law with a value of n = 2. The distribution of articles in journals was found acceptable to the Bradford's law of scattering.