A bibliometric study of Embelia ribes

TL;DR: In this paper, a bibliometric analysis of scientific output of the plant Embelia ribes is presented, which offers an overview of research activity in this field and characterize its most important aspects.

Abstract: Purpose – The study aims to present a bibliometric analysis of scientific output of the plant Embelia ribes, the aim being to offer an overview of research activity in this field and characterize its most important aspects.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 332 articles were collected from following databases: Pub Med, Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Abstract, Indian Science Abstract and Biological Abstract. The searches were restricted to published articles and contain the terms Embelia ribes and Vidanga. The various analyses focus on growth of literature, authorship pattern, most prolific authors, core journals of the subject, most productive institutes and countries. Lotka's law and bradford' law of scattering were applied to count the author productivity and core journals in the subject.Findings – Most articles involved collaboration between two or three authors Author productivity was not found exactly fit to Lotka's law with a value of n = 2. However, distribution of articles in different jour...

Summary

Introduction

• The plant Embelia ribes is distributed throughout India, Malaya and South China.
• ‘‘Vidanga’’, one of the important ayurvedic drugs, is widely used in indigenous system of medicine as an althelmintic, lterative and tonic since ancient times.
• It is known as ‘‘birang’’ in Bengali, ‘‘vavading’’ in Gujarat and Maharashtra, ‘‘baberang’’, ‘‘baibidang’’ and ‘‘baibirang’’ in Hindi, ‘‘vaivalanga’’ and ‘‘vayuvidang’’ in South India and ‘‘babang’’ in Pushtu language.
• LR 57,4 290 Present study was taken up to quantify and map the world scientific output in the area Embelia ribes, the aim being to offer an overview of research activity and to characterize its most important aspects and their evolution over the years.

Objectives of study

• The specific objective of the present study addresses the following aspects: (1) Temporal evolutional of number of publications.
• (2) Number of authors contributing each article and authorship pattern.
• (3) Author productivity through the application of Lotka’s law and most prominent authors in the area of Embelia ribes.
• (4) Output of different journals with their rank and the application of Bradford’s law as an indicator of the dispersion of scientific information.

Methods

• Since the data were collected from various sources, 31 records were found as duplicates and were removed using EndNote’s duplicate removal application.
• Given that the objective of the present study was to analyse all the journal articles published on, Embelia ribes the search was open and not limited to any time period, also known as (2) Time Period.
• Therefore, books, proceedings, book reviews, etc. were all excluded.
• Having applied the above restrictions a total of 332 articles were collected and data were than tabulated using SPPS 15.0.

Data analysis

• The analysis of the present study focused mainly on the frequencies and percentages of publications.
• In addition, however, the productivity of authors and journals was described using Lotka’s law and Bradford’s law of scattering, respectively.
• The number of authors each contributing n articles is proportional to 1/n2, also known as The approximation is.
• This law is often termed ‘‘the inverse square law of scientific productivity’’.
• As an indicator of the dispersion of scientific output, Bradford (Bradford, 1934, 1948) proposed a model of concentric productivity zones with a decreasing information density.

Number of authors

• The number of authors contributing to each article ranged from one to nine: however, Figure 1 shows, 18.37 per cent have a sole author while 36.75 per cent have two authors.
• Articles with more than five authors account for 3.01 per cent of the total number of documents.

Author productivity

• Table II shows the distribution of the number of articles published by each one of the authors, and reveals that whereas some authors contributed to as many as twenty-two articles others only contributed to one.
• As can be seen, 73.86 per cent of authors only contributed to one article, those contributing to more than one, therefore, being much fever in number.
• Only three authors published ten or more studies.
• Lotka’s law has been applied to calculate the number of expected authors for a given number of published studies.
• Putting the value of ‘‘n’’ as 2, the following results (Table III) has been derived.

Prolific authors

• The most prolific authors of the subject Embelia ribes have been identified and ranked form greater to lesser contribution.
• There are only three authors published ten or more articles.
• The author with the greatest contribution in terms of research on Embelia ribes is A.O. Prakash contributing 22 articles, followed by Mathur and Das with 13 and 10 articles respectively.
• Next position occupied by Atal, Chander, Munshi and Venkateswarul with eight article each.
• The contribution of the most prolific authors with scattering in total number of journals is shown in more detail in Table IV.

Core journals in the subject

• The 332 articles analysed in the present study were published in 140 journals from various scientific fields.
• The most productive journals in terms of Embelia ribes are shown in more detail in Table V.
• As can be seen the journals that have published the most articles on Embelia ribes are the Journal of Research in Indian Medicine, Yoga and Homeopathy, Indian Journal of Indigenous Medicines and Fitoterapia accounting for 4.81, 4.51 and 4.21 per cent of the total number of publications, respectively.
• It has been observed that out of 332 articles published in 140 journals, 96 (29.35 per cent) articles were published in ten journals that may be considered as core journals in the subject Embelia ribes.

Bradford’s distribution

• After applying Bradford’s law of scattering with respect to the variable ‘‘journal’’, three concentric zones were defined.
• The core or zone 1 contained 96 (32.78 per cent of the total) articles that were published in ten journals.
• According to Bradford’s law, the number of journals following successively in the three zones should be in the ration of 1: n:n2, while the ratio in each zone of the present is 10:36:99, which is nearly in accordance with the Bradford’s distribution.
• The zone wise distribution of articles in different journals is shown Table VI.

Output of different institutions

• An exhaustive analysis of the articles under study revealed that the various authors come from a wide range of institutions, including research institute, hospitals, colleges etc.
• Bradford’s distributions of articles in different journals Zone Number of journals Number of articles First 10 96 Second 36 112 Third 99 119 Total 140 327 Bibliometric study of Embelia ribes 295 organizations, which have published the most articles on the subject of Embelia ribes (institutions with fever than three articles were not considered here).
• The organizations with the highest productivity are the Jiwaji University and Banaras Hindu University, institutions involved in a total of 26 (7.83 per cent) and 21 (6.32 per cent) articles, respectively.
• These are followed by the scientific output of the Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, the Captain Srinivasa Murthi Drug Research Institute for Ayurved and the Panjab University, whose output ranges from 16 to 12 articles and accounts for 11.74 per cent of the total number of publications.

Countries

• In studying this variable, countries were ranked from greater to lesser productivity, taking into account that authors from different countries may contribute to the same article.
• The country with the greatest output in terms of research on Embelia ribes is the India (63.86 per cent), followed by USA and UK, with a total of 29 (8.73 per cent) Table VII.
• Most productive institutions Institution Rank Number of articles % Jiwaji University, Gwalior 1 26 7.83 Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi 2 21 6.33 Govind Ballabh.
• Next come Japan (5.72 per cent), Italy (4.22 per cent) and Germany, the remaining countries publishing a total of 17 documents between them, accounting for 10.6 per cent of output.

Global distribution of journals

• As pointed out that a total of 332 articles were published in 140 journals.
• The most productive countries in terms of number of journals are shown in Table IX.
• As can be seen, 57.14 per cent journals on the subject Embelia ribes have been published from India, followed by USA and UK with the 16 and 14 journals, respectively, accounting 21.42 per cent of the total number of journals.
• Remaining 40 (28.57 per cent) journals have been published from 11 countries.

Discussions and conclusion

• Throughout this study, an analysis of scientific output on the subject of Embelia ribes has been carried out in terms of frequencies and publications.
• Taking specific objectives into account the following conclusions can be drawn: (1) Interest in the subject of Embelia ribes grew considerably during last quarter of the 20th century, particularly since 1980s, 1990 and 2000s.
• (3) The number of authors contributing to each article range from one to nine, however, most articles involved collaboration between two or three authors.
• According to Bradford’s law of scattering this distribution fits 1:n:n2, such that the most peripheral zone should contain a greater number of journal titles thanwas obtained in present study.
• The most productive organizations were the Jiwaji University and Banaras Hindu University. (7) Although the authors contributing to the articles collected originating from 16 different countries, most output (91.26 per cent) was distributed across only five countries, the most productive being the India, which participated in 63.85 per cent of the publications studied.

Figures

Table I. Year-wise distribution of articles

Table IV. Ranking of authors by contribution and their scattering in the journals

Frequently asked questions

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The study aims to present a bibliometric analysis of scientific output of the plant Embelia ribes, the aim being to offer an overview of research activity in this field and characterize its most important aspects. The searches were restricted to published articles and contain the terms Embelia ribes and Vidanga. The various analyses focus on growth of literature, authorship pattern, most prolific authors, core journals of the subject, most productive institutes and countries. Lotka ’ s law and bradford ’ law of scattering were applied to count the author productivity and core journals in the subject. The paper offers an overview of research activity into the plant Embelia ribes.