A Scientometric Assessment of Obesity Research Publications from India during 2007-16

The paper examines 3960 Indian publications on obesity, as covered in Scopus database during 2007-16, registering an annual average growth rate of 10.28% and qualitative impact averaged to 12.50 citations per paper. The top 15 most productive countries in global obesity research individually contributed global share from 2.02% to 48.90%, with USA accounting for the highest publication share (48.90%), followed by U.K. (11.37%), Germany and Italy (6.52% and 6.26%), Canada, Australia, Spain and France (from 5.18% to 5.89%), etc. during 2007-16 etc. Together, the 15 most productive countries accounted for more than 100% of global publications share during 2007-16. The share of India’s internationally collaborative papers (ICP) in obesity research was 20.25% during 2007-16, which increased from 17.92% during 2007-11 to 21.44% during 2012-16. Medicine, among subjects, accounted for the highest publications share (89.22%) in India’s obesity research, followed by biochemistry, genetics & molecular biology (34.24%), pharmacology, toxicology & pharmaceutics (20.53%), nursing (8.33%), agricultural & biological sciences (5.96%), chemistry (2.02%), neurosciences (1.92%) and immunology and microbiology (1.67%) during 2007-16 The top 25 and 20 most productive Indian organizations and authors together contributed 43.64% and 21.67% respectively as their share of Indian publication output and 82.03% and 80.61% respectively as their share of Indian citation output during 2007-16. Among the total journal output of 4503 papers, the top 15 journals contributed 19.94% share to the Indian journal output during 2007-16, which increased from 19.16% to 20.27% from 2007-11 to 2012-16. Of the total 3960 research papers in obesity research from India, the top 114 highly cited publications registered citations from 100 to 1805 and they together received 28158 citations, with 247.0 citations per paper. These 114 highly cited papers were published in 69 journals, of which 11 papers were published in The Lancet, followed by International Journal of Obesity and Diabetes Research & Clinical Practice (6 papers each), Nutrition (5 papers), Diabetes Care and Diabetologia (4 papers each), etc.