The Last Three Decades of Contact Dermatitis A Bibliometric Analysis of Global Publications on Contact Dermatitis

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Contact dermatitis is a common inflammatory skin disease, and it affects approximately 20% of the adult population. Bibliometrics is a statistical analysis of academic literature h a certain field. Although bibliometric studies have been popular in recent years, the literature has limited number of bibliometric researches focusing on dermatology. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to perform the first bibliometric analysis of contact dermatitis literature. METHODS: All data of our study were obtained from the databases provided by Web of Science. We used the keywords contact dermatitis, irritant contact dermatitis, allergic contact dermatitis, cutaneous allergy, occupational dermatitis, and patch test for our search. All items published between 1988 and 2017 were included. RESULTS: A total of 37,283 documents were found. The most studied research areas were dermatology, immunology, and allergy (79.7%, 65.02%, and 58.6%, respectively). The peak year of contact dermatitis literature was 2011 with 1,782 items. The United States covered 24.77% of contact dermatitis literature with 9,237 documents. Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, and France followed the United States (n = 4,121, 3,420, 2,870, and 2,627 items, respectively). Denmark was the most productive country, followed by Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, and Belgium. CONCLUSION: Physicians from developing and least developed countries should be supported to perform novel bibliometric researches on contact dermatitis.