Research Trends in Medical Physics: A Global Perspective

The paper presents an analysis of 11181 global publications in medical physics, indexed in Web of science database during 2000-2013; the average number of publications published per year was 798.64. Out of 11181 publications, maximum of 5014 (44.84%) publications have been contributed by mega authors, followed by multi authors with 3588 (32.09%) publications. The value of co authorship index for mega authored publications is the highest. The highest value of collaboration coefficient is 0.67 in 2013. The Degree of collaboration of publications of the medical physics is 0.96. Hendee, W R, Medical college Wisconsin, USA is the most productive author contributing 57 publications followed by Levin, C S, Stanford university school of medicine, USA with 52 publications and Yanagida, T, University of Tokyo, Japan with 51 publications. USA had the highest share (32.43%) of publications followed by Germany with 10.56% publications, Japan with 9.19% publications, and UK with 7.74% publications, and Italy with 7.47% publications and China with 5.11% publications. Among the prolific institutions, Istituto nazionale di fisica nucleare, Frascati, Italy had the highest (2.95%) publications followed by European organization for nuclear research CERN, Switzerland with (1.93%) publications. Publications on medical physics are spread over 24 languages. Medicine contributed the largest share (58.42%) publications among subjects, followed by physics and astronomy (57.17%) publications, engineering (18.26%), biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology (8.18%) and health professions (8.10%) publications