Evolution Of Cardiovascular Disease Research: Quantitative Analyses Of Scientific Publications

Cardiovascular research has underpinned major advances in patient care but the introduction of new therapies has slowed down. Experts in the cardiovascular field are concerned that there is a decline in innovation in cardiovascular research and that fragmentation of this broad field is leading to loss of cross-pollination and missed opportunities for translation of research from bench to bedside. In this context, in this PhD project we examined cardiovascular research publication output over a 20-year period to provide data driven evidence about cardiovascular disease research. The main research questions focused on assessing the change in the strength and structure of communication and collaboration in the cardiovascular field over time. We also worked to identify and characterise the topics within the cardiovascular field. We used a hybrid text-citation based information retrieval strategy to establish a broad dataset of publications in the cardiovascular field from 1992-2013. We obtained all bibliographic data for 845,701 cardiovascular publications from the Web of Science database, including over 5.8 million citations to these publications. We used quantitative methods, including bibliometrics, network analysis and text mining, to analyze the dataset of cardiovascular publication output. Key findings include that the publication output in cardiovascular research has grown steadily from 1992 to 2013. The number of countries participating in cardiovascular research has increased; however, the geographical distribution of research outputs has changed over time. The share of publications by the USA has decreased, while other countries increased their share of publications. In particular, China experienced a dramatic increase in the number and share of cardiovascular publications. Overall, there was also an increase in international collaborations in cardiovascular research, with more authors from different countries publishing research together. The countries with more international collaborations also had increased visibility, especially if they already had high impact research. The analysis of 565 journals found that cardiovascular research is being published in 104 newly established journals since 1993. Overall, an equal share of cardiovascular documents is published in core cardiovascular journals as in broader biomedical science journals. This is an indicator of the broad range of cardiovascular research taking place and, potentially, of growth in interdisciplinary research. Studying the journal networks we found growth in clinically focused cardiovascular research over time. Some areas in cardiovascular research maintain a stable journal network over time, such as the areas of surgery, anesthesiology and nuclear medicine, as they link more closely with the broader journals in these fields than with basic science or clinical cardiovascular journals. Over time the communication between clinical and basic/preclinical journal networks increases to the point that the two separate communities merge, a potential indicator of translation in cardiovascular research. In the last part of this project, we identified and named, with expert input, 175 topics within the cardiovascular research from 2004-2013. We also used different methods to identify and name the largest ten groups or networks of documents in 2006-2008 and in 2011-2013. The most prevalent topics and largest groups had a large clinical focus and also covered the broad issues of evidence-based guidance, cardiovascular disease risk factors, mortality, biomarkers, cell signalling and gene transcription, among others. This evidence and increased understanding of the variation in cardiovascular research across countries, journals and content, provides added value to the cardiovascular community and its stakeholders when undertaking future decisions in research and policies.nrpages: 110status: publishe