Bibliometric Analysis of Drowning Research

Abstract

Drowning is still a constant global and underestimated problem with a variety of implications for public health. In view of this problem, worldwide research activities in this field still need to be increased. This chapter focuses on bibliometric features of research related to drowning. Since precise bibliometric and scientometric approaches have not been implemented until recently, it mainly summarizes and cites the findings of a novel study which is based on the NewQIS platform [1–3]. This platform has been implemented to analyze basic parameters of research output. Next to the field of drowning, areas of biomedicine including respiratory medicine [4–6] or public health including tobacco control [7, 8] were in the focus of this platform. The platform uses the combination of classical bibliometry and novel visualizing techniques. In this respect, all drowning-related studies that were listed in the ISI Web of Science database between 1900 and 2007 were retrieved by the use of the search term “drowning” [1]. The resulting data matrix was then combined with density-equalizing mapping calculations which are based on the algorithms by Gastner and Newman [9]. In specific, all territories were correlated to different parameters and subsequently resized according to the number of published items related to drowning, the worldwide drowning rates, and the total number of drowning deaths worldwide. The developing image of the world map, the cartogram, was then visualized as a distorted image according to the corresponding parameter.