Abstract

The paper examines 1744 Indian publications on rheumatoid arthritis research, as covered in Scopus database during 2007-16, experiencing an annual average growth rate of 8.19% and qualitative citation impact averaged to 9.23 citations per paper. India’s share in global output was 3.05% during 2007-16, which increased from 2.46% to 3.61% from 2007-11 to 2012-16. The international collaborative share of India’s publications in rheumatoid arthritis research was 11.75% during 2007-16, which increased from 11.35% to 12.02% from 2007-11 to 2012-16. Medicine, among subjects contributed the highest publications share (58.89%) in India’s output in rheumatoid arthritis,, followed by pharmacology, toxicology & pharmaceutics (30.91%), biochemistry, genetics & molecular biology (18.41%), immunology & microbiology (12.10%) and chemistry (3.44%) during 2007-16.

The top 15 most productive organizations and authors together contributed 29.87% and 18.23% respectively as their share of global publication output and 37.92% and 22.36% respectively as their share of global citation output during 2007-16. Among the total journal output of 1722 papers (98.98.74% of total output), the top 15 journals contributed 31.24% share to the global journal output in rheumatoid arthritis research in India during 2007-16, which increased from 30.41% to 31.79% from 2007-11 and 2012-16. Indian Journal of Radiology contributed the largest number of papers (169), followed by International Journal of Rheumatic Diseases (50 papers), Rheumatology International (36 papers), Clinical Rheumatology (30 papers), etc. during 2007-16. Of the total Indian rheumatoid arthritis research output, the top 12 highly cited publications registered citations from 101 to 1138 during 2007-16, which together received 3405 citations, which averaged to 283.78 citations per paper.

Keywords: Rheumatoid arthritis research; Indian publications; Scientometrics; Bibliometrics