Temporal trend of research related to gun violence from 1981 to 2018 in the United States: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Background: We aimed to evaluate the variation in gun violence-related research in the US over time to determine if there are meaningful changes in frequency of research at certain time points. Related publications were searched from the Web of Science. Methods: We searched articles from Web of Science to collect publication data of gun violence research in three disciplines (clinical sciences, life sciences, and social behavior sciences) from 1981 to 2018. The joinpoint regression approach was applied to evaluate the trend of publication ratio. We also adopted the generalized additive mixed model to compare the publication ratio among the three research disciplines. Results: During the study period, each research discipline had a significant decrease in publication ratios, especially social behavioral sciences from 2001 to 2011, with an annual percentage change = - 9.77% (95% CI = - 13.45, - 5.93; p-value