Sharma et al. Health Research Policy and Systems (2018) 16:18 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-018-0298-9 REVIEW Open Access A bibliometric analysis of the published road traffic injuries research in India, post-1990 Neeraj Sharma1,2, Mohan Bairwa1,3* , B. Gowthamghosh1, S. D. Gupta1 and D. K. Mangal1 Abstract Background: Globally, road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death among those aged 15–29 years. However, road traffic injury research has not received adequate attention from the scientific community in low- and middle- income countries, including India. The present study aims to provide a bibliometric overview of research assessing road traffic injuries in India. Methods: We used Scopus to extract relevant research in road traffic injuries published from 1991 to 2017. This study presented the key bibliometric indicators such as trends of annual publications and citations, top 10 authors, journals, institutions and highly cited articles, citation analysis of articles, co-occurrence of keywords, etc. Analysis was performed using Scopus, Microsoft Excel, and VOS-viewer. Results: A total of 242 articles were retrieved with an h-index of 18, excluding self-citations. A steadfast growth of publications was documented in last decade, especially after the year 2010. The h-index of the top 10 authors, institutions, journals and highly cited articles did not surpass single digits. A network visualisation map showed that ‘traffic accident’, ‘male’, ‘adolescent’ and ‘child’ were the most commonly encountered key terms. The prominent authors were Gururaj G, Dandona R, and Hyder AA, whereas the top journals were the Indian Journal of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, Medico Legal Update, and the International Journal of Applied Engineering Research and top institutions were the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and the Administrative Staff College of India. Conclusion: In India, road traffic injuries research is inadequate in quantity and quality, warranting greater attention from researchers and policy planners to address the burden of road traffic injuries. Keywords: Injury, Road crashes, Fatalities Background related deaths have increased by 43% over the last 10 years In 1990, injuries in general ranked as the 12th contributor [5]. Unless new initiatives and intense efforts are made, in global disease burden in terms of disability adjusted life the total number of road traffic deaths in India is likely to years (DALY), rising to 7th rank in 2010 and projected to surpass 250,000 by 2025 [6]. reach 5th by the year 2030 [1, 2]. Road traffic injuries In India, RTIs, particularly those involving pedestrians, (RTIs) account for approximately 30% of injury-related cyclists and motorised 2- or 3-wheelers, are a significant deaths worldwide, and are the most common cause of cause of preventable death, predominantly in men of pro- death among people aged 15–29 years [3]. In India, ductive age [7]. Research in RTIs has not received much approximately 28% of total DALYs lost due to injuries are attention from the scientific community due to a lack of attributed to RTIs alone [4]. In 2016, there were 150,785 focus in national policies and funding opportunities, espe- deaths occurring in 480,652 road crashes. Further, RTI- cially in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). In India, such as in most LMICs, the research output on key * Correspondence: [email protected] public health issues, including RTIs, remains poor. Indeed, 1Centre for Injury Research (CIR), The IIHMR University, Jaipur, India 3Public Health and Epidemiology, The IIHMR University, 1, Prabhu Dayal only 4.4% of the total health research studies published in Marg, Near Sanganer Airport, Jaipur 302029, India India during 2002 were related to public health sciences Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Sharma et al. Health Research Policy and Systems (2018) 16:18 Page 2 of 11 [8] and the contribution of injury research (2001–2008) In this study, we used the definition of RTI provided was only 0.7% (RTI research, 0.1%), which is grossly inad- by WHO, namely “a fatal or non-fatal injury incurred equate to address the current disease burden [9]. because of a collision on a public road involving at least National Crime Record Bureau data shows a clearly one moving vehicle” [16]. The keywords for developing rising burden of RTI-related morbidity and mortality in the search strategy were determined using published re- India [9]. Realising the urgency, the Government of India view articles on RTIs and the WHO definition of RTI, in initiated a drive to address the increasing RTI burden in consultation with authors and subject experts. By using the 11th Five Year Plan (2007–2012) by developing a pan- asterisks, we tried to retrieve all the possible keywords. India network of trauma care facilities to provide immedi- Using a title search only there was a strong possibility ate treatment for accident victims along the Golden of false negative results. Therefore, we tried multiple Quadrilateral Corridor as well as the North-South and search strategies, yet all of them led to a substantial East-West Corridors. The objective of this scheme was to number of false positive results without any significant reduce the number of preventable deaths because of road inclusion of relevant articles. Thus, a title search query accidents to 10% [10]. Nevertheless, there is no published was performed, considering it avoided large numbers of research of appropriate quality on the assessment of RTI false positive articles but would have missed only some burden or on the effectiveness of interventions [8]. of the true articles (Fig. 1). Responding to these issues, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has recently invited countrywide Inclusion and exclusion criteria research proposals on RTIs specifically focusing on Studies published in journals (indexed in Scopus®) and surveillance, health system preparedness, and barriers and either exclusively or in partly undertaken in India were facilitators during the golden hour, as well as to develop included. We screened the title of all identified articles interventions to address the problem of RTIs [11]. In to ensure the reliability of the search and we reviewed addition, systematic reviews and bibliometric analyses the abstract in case of any confusion regarding the rele- may be valuable tools to fill this research gap. Bibliometric vance of the article. In the case of papers without abstracts, analyses may aid policy planners and researchers in identi- we screened the full texts. fying critical research areas for evidence-based decision- Books, book chapters, book series and errata documents making and policy formulation in LMICs [12]. were excluded using the refine and limit functionalities in Therefore, the present bibliometric analysis aims to Scopus® to restrict the analysis to literature in peer- map RTI research output, assessing the quality of the reviewed journals. No language restrictions were made. research ecosystem in India, and identifying the focus areas and actors involved. This analysis will help inform Data analysis researchers, academicians and the scientific community We analysed annual trends of publications and their cita- on the need and importance of research in this emerging tions, the citation relationship among authors, citation public health issue. analysis of articles, and the top 10 productive authors, journals and institutions and highly cited publications. Methods The growth in the number of research publications and This study is a bibliometric analysis of research published trends of citations over the years were presented using line in the field of RTIs in India. Bibliometrics, a widely used diagrams. We calculated the Hirsh index (h-index) of technique, involves the quantitative analysis of citations of authors, journals and institutions for RTI-related publica- published journal articles [12]. The bibliometric analysis tions only. The h-index, introduced by JE Hirsch in 2005, methodology used herein followed that used in previous is now widely accepted and employed as a measure of the studies [8, 13, 14]. This study included the RTI research total effective research output of a researcher, journal, performed in India from 1990 to date. institution or country. The h-index of a scientist has a value of x if x number of their published articles have each Search strategy been cited at least x times in other papers, and their Several electronic databases may be used to perform remaining articles have less than x citations each [17]. bibliometric analyses to study research output. Herein, While calculating the h-index, we removed self-citations Scopus®, the largest global database of medical and social to improve the validity of search results. science research, was used since it is considered the most The impact factor (IF) and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) reliable and robust database of scientific literature. were presented for the top 10 journals. The IF is a meas- Scopus® has several advantages over other databases like urement of visibility of articles in specific journals. It was Web of Science, EMABASE, PubMed, and Google Scholar originally developed by Eugene Garfield, and is calculated [15], including a wide range of publications and more as the ratio of the number of citations in a given year accurate data analysis. divided by the number of ‘citable’ articles published in the Sharma et al.