Crohn's Disease: A Critical Approach to Publication Procedures and Citation Behavior of the Global Research Network

Crohn's disease (CD) is an inflammatory bowel disease, which can lead to abdominal pain, weight loss, fatigue, severe diarrhea, and malnutrition. Despite enormous efforts and progress in diagnosis and therapy, there are still many aspects of uncertainty leading to an increasing scientific interest in this topic. As it is challenging to survey all articles regarding CD and to measure their scientific importance, this study uses reliable scientometric tools to evaluate the global research output on CD related to quantitative and qualitative aspects and in chronological and geographical context. We conducted a scientometric analysis to assess all global research activity on CD from 1900 until 2013. We analyzed the research output of countries, individual institutions, journals, authors and their collaborative networks and depicted our findings by density-equalizing map projections. The worldwide research architecture indicated that the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France play leading role regarding scientific activity, h-indices, multilateral and bilateral cooperations. There is a dramatic increase of collaborative publications since the 1990s, which underlines recent studies pronouncing that the scientific progress will be mainly depending on international cooperations. We conclude that the field of CD is constantly progressing, in which the influence of international cooperations on the scientific productivity is of major and growing importance. North American and Western European nations constitute the scientific leaders in the field of CD whereas developing or underdeveloped countries did not exhibit considerable research productivity.