Hitit Medical Journal (Oct 2019)
A holistic analysis of bee venom literature: Bibliometric evaluation of the global publication productivity on bee venom between 1975 and 2017
Abstract
Objective: Bee venom produced by Apis mellifera is a complex mixture of bioactive peptides, enzymes and biogenic amines. Bibliometrics is a novel and popular statistical method of evaluation of academic literature in a certain field. We aimed to analyze bee venom literature in this study and used four databases provided by Web of Science. Materials and Method: All documents published between 1975 and 2017 were included from WoS databases and analyzed. Results: A total of 4117 articles was found. The most items were original articles (88.15%) and 87.37% of which were in English. The USA ranked first in the literature with 884 papers followed by South Korea, Switzerland and Germany (10.42, 6.82 and 6.46%, respectively) while Switzerland was found to be the most productive country with the highest productivity score (33.15) followed by Austria, Denmark and Slovenia (12.36, 11.51 and 11.06, respectively). Kyung Hee University from South Korea was noted to be the leading institution with 112 publications. “Bee venom”, “allergy”, “immunotherapy” and “melittin” were found as the most used keywords. Conclusion: Wedetected that all the most contributor countries were developed in the classification of United Nations and we suggest that researchers from least developed and developing countries should be supported to perform novel bee venom studies.
