International Scientific Productivity on Second-Generation Antipsychotic Drugs in Taiwan: A Bibliometric Study

Abstract

Background: This is a bibliometric study on the scientific papers of second generation (atypical) antipsychotic drugs (SGAs) from Taiwan. Methods: With the EMBASE and MEDLINE databases, we chose the published documents from Taiwan with the descriptors of atypical*, antipsychotic*, second-generation antipsychotic*, clozapine, risperidone, olanzapine, ziprasidone, quetiapine, sertindole, aripiprazole, paliperidone, amisulpride, zotepine, asenapine, iloperidone and lurasidone. We used bibliometric indicators of production and dispersion, i.e., Price's law on the increased scientific papers, and Bradford's law on dispersion. We also calculated the participation index of the different countries, and correlated those bibliometric data with some social and health data from Taiwan (such as total per capita expenditure on health and overall volume of production in the field of Psychiatry and Neurology). Results: We downloaded 359 SGA-related original documents published from 1993 to 2011:29.53% of them were dealt with clinical efficacy and 40.11% tolerance and safety. Our study results fulfilled Price's law, that scientific SGA papers showed exponential growth (r = 0.9601, as against an r = 0.9305 after linear adjustment). OfSGA publications, the drugs most studied are clozapine (89 papers), risperidone (82), aripiprazole (74), olanzapine (62), and quetiapine (22). Division of the results into Bradford zones yielded a nucleus published exclusively in the Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Bio logical Psychiatry (56 articles). All papers from Taiwan were published in 90 different journals, and 8 of the first 10 most often published journals for Taiwanese papers have an impact factor being greater than 2. Conclusion: The published SGA papers from Taiwan have been growing exponentially from 1933-2011, without any evidence of reaching a saturation point.