Publication activity in the field of Sjögren’s syndrome: a ten-year Web of Science based analysis

Bibliometric analysis is widely utilized to evaluate global research productivity in different research topics. However, to date, there has been no assessment of worldwide research productivity associated with Sjögren’s syndrome. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the global research productivity in the field of Sjögren's syndrome using bibliometric analysis. The Web of Science database was scanned with the search terms ‘Sjögren’s syndrome’ and ‘Sjögren syndrome’ for publications in the period 2010–2019. Original articles and reviews were selected for analysis. The most active countries were determined, and the number of articles, citations, research productivity adjusted by population and gross domestic product were analyzed. A total of 3856 articles were identified from 65 different countries. A statistically significant trend was observed in the direction of increase (in terms of the number of articles; from 282 to 461) in the 10-year period. A total of 3004 (77.90%) articles were from high-income countries. The five most productive countries were the United States (n = 714, 18.51%), China (n = 428, 11.09%), Japan (n = 308, 7.98%), Italy (n = 299, 7.75%) and France (n = 249, 6.45%). When the number of articles was adjusted according to population, Norway was the most productive country, followed by Greece and the Netherlands. In analysis according to gross domestic product, Greece was the leading country, followed by Norway and the Netherlands. The results of this study demonstrated a remarkable growth in global research productivity on Sjögren’s syndrome between 2010 and 2019. More than three quarters of the articles were from high-income countries. When population and gross domestic product were considered, relatively small European countries came to the fore.