The evolution of the field of legal medicine: A holistic investigation of global outputs with bibliometric analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to make a holistic summary of the articles published in the field of Legal Medicine/Forensic Science through bibliometric methods, determine the top cited publications in the field, and to determine the most active journals and especially trend topics. The articles published in the field of Legal Medicine between the years 1975 and 2018 were downloaded from the Web of Science index and were analyzed using bibliometric methods. The correlations between the number of publications of the countries and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDP PPP) values was analyzed using the Spearman's correlation coefficient. The number of articles to be published in the field of Legal Medicine between the years 2019 and 2022 was estimated with linear regression analysis. The results showed that there were totally 38845 articles published in the field of Legal Medicine. Regression analysis results indicate that it will exceed 2500 publications after 2022. The most productive countries in the field of Legal Medicine were the USA (12.448, 32.045%). A high correlation was found between legal medicine publication productivity and GDP and GDP PPP (r = 0.726, p < 0.001; r = 0.703, p < 0.001). As for the collaboration between countries, analysis results showed that the network web indicated the most important factor as the geographical location. This study will provide important information to a forensic scientist (a doctor, academic, and practitioner).