World Rabies Research Output : A Scientometric Assessment of Publication Output during 2006-15

The paper examines 7818 world publications on global rabies research, as indexed in Scopus database covering the period 1999-2014. The global rabies research increased by 5.87% per annum and its citation impact averaged to 14.27 citations per paper. Top 15 most productive countries continued to dominate world rabies research through 1999-2014 both in terms of quality and quantity of research. Together they accounted for as much as 83.82% share of world total output during 1999-2014. Twelve of these top countries scored relative citation index (RCI) above the world average of 1: USA (1.74), U.K. (1.70), France (1.66), Switzerland (1.62), Germany and Netherlands (1.50 each), Australia (1.44), Japan (1.39), Thailand (1.35), Canada (1.31), South Africa (1.24) and Italy (1.08) during 19992014. Being a multidisciplinary topic, world rabies research is widely scattered across several disciplines. Medicine contributed the largest share 54.80%, followed by 7 other disciplines. The top 20 most productive organizations and authors engaged on rabies research respectively accounted for 40.94% and 21.42% share of publications output and 39.62% and 34.90% share of world citations during 1999-14. The world rabies research output is highly scattered across journals. Top 20 most productive journals barely accounted for 24.06% share of global rabies research. Less than 2 per cent of global rabies research papers (148) received 100 plus citations, cumulated 29160 citations, with an average of 197.03 citations per paper. These 148 highly cited papers involved the participation of 1003 authors and 502 organizations and were published in 85 journals. The USA contributed the largest number of highly cited papers (89), followed by U.K. (32), France (20), Germany (11), Canada, Australia and Belgium (7 each), Thailand and Switzerland (6 each), Japan (5), Kenya (4), South Africa, Russia Federation and Tanzania (3 each), etc. For India, rabies research is not a top priority.


INTRODUCTION
Rabies pose a significant threat to humans in much of the developing world, kills tens of thousands of people each year and impacts the lives of as many as 5 billion people.Over 95% of human rabies deaths today occur in Africa and Asia as a result of being bitten by an infected dog and up to 60% of all dog bites and rabies deaths occur in children under 15 years of age.The cost of this in terms of global economic output is a staggering $124 billion: this disproportionately hits poorer parts of the world hardest. 1 The virus widely disseminates throughout the body at the time of clinical onset. 2 Interestingly, bats are primary or sole reservoir hosts for all lyssaviruses except MOKV (for which the reservoir species has not been clearly identified as of yet). 3 Rabies is inevitably fatal and death occurs during the first seven days of illness without intensive care due to respiratory failure. 4Rabies being a zoonotic disease, the threat to humans is likely to continue for many more years as huge animal reservoirs exist in most parts of the world.But global elimination of rabies is a possibility through prevention, epidemiology and control.Vaccination for high-risk individuals, surveillance of human cases, post-exposure prophylaxis following animal bites, vaccination and/or culling of the canine population and other animal reservoirs are the key interventions for rabies control.WHO recommendations can prevent the onset of rabies in virtually all exposures.Globally, the most cost-effective strategy for preventing rabies in people is by eliminating rabies in dogs and wildlife animals through annual vaccinations. 1Middle East and Eastern Europe Rabies Expert Bureau (MEEREB) has been active on rabies research particularly in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Ukraine where several human deaths have occurred due to canine rabies.Post exposure treatments are increasing in these countries.Iran alone is administering more than 200,000 PEPs to humans bitten by dogs.Intradermal rabies vaccination (IDRV) with modern cell culture rabies vaccines is widely used in many developing countries nowadays.However, research on minimum potency requirement for IDRV is still underway.Scientists are trying to understand the kinetics of immune response to varying antigenic content and dosage schedule of IDRV.Research is also underway on anamnestic response to booster doses of vaccine in children from rabies endemic countries who have already received 2 or 3 doses of preexposure primary vaccination in the past.Several national and international organizations including World Health Organization (WHO) and Global Alliance for Rabies Control (GARC) are though actively working out various strategies for getting international and national commitment to eliminate human rabies and reduce canine rabies, but given the fact that many new developments have taken place in rabies prevention in humans and canine rabies control, more and more efforts are needed at the global, national and community levels to defeat a disease which wreaks untold suffering on millions of people each year and to reduce the burden of rabies focusing particularly on the Asian and African countries.Most rabies research is done in the basic sciences but key questions remain unaddressed.Policy-makers need evidence for social, political and economic outcomes of control programmers'.Researchpolicy disconnect in rabies control is as important an issue of concern as is rabies research in basic sciences.

Literature Review
Very few sciento metric studies have so far been conducted on rabies research both at global and country level.Amongst such studies, Takahashi-Omoe and Omoe. 5 based on the analysis of articles and patent applications reported current trends in research and development for rabies control in USA, the EU and Asia.Sithi Jagannara. 6analyzed 11567 papers on global rabies research as indexed in CAB database covering the period 1964-2015 using indicators such as publication growth, language wise distribution, country-wise distribution, etc. Kakkar, Venkataramanan, Chauhan and Abbas. 7reviewed Indian rabies research 93 articles published during 2001-2011.61% of the total articles consisted of laboratory based studies on rabies virus and 8% studies on animals, the least studied group.One third of articles were published in three journals focusing on vaccines and infectious disease epidemiology.The top 4 institutions (2 each from the animal and human health sectors) collectively produced 49% of the national research output.Biomedical research on development of new interventions dominated the total output to improve existing interventions.Sachithanantham and Raja. 8analyzed 495 records of Indian research output in rabies as indexed PubMed database covering the period 1950-2014 on indicators such as literature growth, world share, prolific authors profile, collaborative pattern, journal distribution, most productive institutions, and geographical distribution.The Bradford law of scattering did not apply to rabies research in India.Gupta, Sharma and Gupta. 9analyzed 510 India's publications on rabies research -as indexed in Scopus International multidisciplinary database covering the period 1999-2014 -using indicators such as publication growth, citation impact, international collaboration, subject-wise distribution, distribution by Indian organizations and authors, medium of communication and characteristics of highly cited papers.

Methodology
The study retrieved and downloaded the rabies research publication data of the world and 12 most productive countries from the Scopus database (http://www.scopus.com) for 16 years during 1999-2014.The keyword "rabies disease" was used in "title, abstract and keyword" tag and restricting it to the period 1999-2014 in "date range tag" was used for searching the global publication data and this was considered as the main search string.The main search string was restricted to individual 12 most productive countries one by one in the "country tag" for obtaining publication data on each country, including India.When the main search string was further restricted to "subject area tag", "country tag", "source title tag", "journal title name" and "affiliation tag", information on distribution of publications by subject, collaborating countries, organization-wise and journal-wise, etc. was obtained For citation data, the open window is used and citations window for each article starts from date of publication till 15 November 2015.A number of quantitative and qualitative measures are used to measure the performance of global rabies disease research.

Data Analysis & Results
The global research output on rabies research cumulated to 7818 publications during the study period 1999-2014.The yearly research output in this field increased from 318 in the first year 1999 to 684 publications in the last year 2014 with 5.87% growth per annum.The global publications on rabies research received 14.27 citations per paper (Table 1).Bulk of the total publications output on rabies research 63.42% (4958) appeared as articles, followed by 16.99% (1328) as review papers, 4.31% (337) as conference papers, 3.48% (272) as notes, 2.60% (203) as short surveys, 2.23% (174) as book chapters, 2.05% (160) as editorials, and other erratum (0.52%), books (0.46%), articles in press (0.33%) and conference review (0.01%) during 1999-2014.

Scientometric Profile of the Highly Productive Organizations on Rabies Research
The top 20 most productive organizations engaged on global rabies research individually published 64 to 328 publications and together published 3201 publications, received 44211 citations, accounting for 40.94% and 39.62% share of world publications and citations during the study period 1999-14.The scientometric profile of these 20 organizations along with their research output, citations received, and h-index values are presented in Table 5.Three organizations registered publication share above the group average productivity of 160.

Table 1 : Publication Growth of World Rabies Research and Citations during 1999-2014
TP=Total Papers; TC=Total Citations; ACPP=Average Citations Per Paper

Table 4 : Subject-Wise Distribution of Global Publications on Rabies research, 2005-14.
TP=Total Papers; TC=Total Citations; ACPP=Average Citations Per Paper; HCP=High Cited Publications; HI=h-index *There is a overlapping of papers under various subjects and as a result the sum of total output of subjects will be more than the global output

Table 10 : Most Productive Journals on Rabi Research, 1999-2014 S.No Name of the Journal Number of Papers 1999-06 2007-14 1999-2014
Journal of General Virology,The Lancet and Virus Research (3 papers each), Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Gene Therapy, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Lancet, Nature Biotechnology, Nature, Neuron and Reviews in Medical Virology (2 papers) and 1 paper each in rest of the 60 journals.
.87% per annum.Top 15 countries dominate global rabies research with as much as 83.82% world share.The USA is world leader in rabies research with 27.68% world share, followed by U.K. (9.45%),France (7.65%), India (6.52%), Germany, China, Brazil and Canada (from 5.0% to 5.55%), Japan, Australia, Thailand and Switzerland (from 2.46% to 3.47%), Italy, South Africa and Netherlands (from 1.38% to 1.73%) during 1999-2014.The top 12 countries registered relative citation index (RCI) above the world average of 1: USA (1.74), followed by U.K.(1.70),France (1.66), Switzerland (1.62), Germany and Netherlands (1.50 each), Australia (1.44), Japan (1.39), Thailand (1.35), Canada (1.31), South Africa (1.24) and Italy (1.08) during 1999-2014.Rabies research is highly collaborative in nature.The share of international collaborative publications by Netherland (62.96%) was the largest, The contribution of top 20 most productive organizations and authors rabies research accounted for 40.94% and 21.42% share of publications output and 39.62% and 34.90% share of world citations during 1999-14.The top 20 most productive journals account for 24.06% share of global rabies research, which increased from 24.01% to 24.09% from 1999-2006 to 2007-14.The share of highly cited papers in global rabies research is still very small even less than 2 per cent of total world output.These 148 highly cited together received 29160 citations, averaging to 197.03 citations per paper.The USA as usual contributed the largest number (89) of highly cited papers followed by U.K. (32), France (20), Germany (11), with contributions from 27 other countries.Center