Scientometric analysis of research on Zika virus

Abstract

The research productivity on Zika virus (ZV) had been evaluated applying scientometrics. The different aspects of scientific literature on the subject under study accessible through ‘Scopus’ were explored. An advanced search was conducted in the database for ‘Zika’ and ‘Virus’ as main operators for analytical purposes. Search terms were connected using Boolean Operator ‘AND’ to retrieve relevant records. The search results were further filtered for journals articles. A total of 573 ZV associated records were retrieved including 6 duplicate items, after deleting which the relevant results remained 567. Lotka’s law was applied for assessing the author productivity and Bradford’s law of scattering was used to ascertain the distribution pattern of articles in journals. The results revealed a high degree of research/authorship collaborative on ZV. The authorship pattern did not fit to the Lotka’s law with a value of n = 2. The distribution of articles in journals was found nearly acceptable to the Bradford’s law of scattering, advocating the existence of a few core journals contributing significantly on ZV.