A global productivity and bibliometric analysis of telemedicine and teledermatology publication trends during 1980–2013

Abstract

Telemedicine and teledermatology literature has a limited number of bibliometrics reports. We aimed to analyze telemedicine and teledermatology literature using the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database. The statistical analysis of the documents published during 1980–2013 was performed. We also analyzed the correlations between economical productivities, humanity index, and technological advancement levels and performances of the countries in both fields. The USA ranked first in the telemedicine field with 3204 publications and 33.8% of the world production followed by the UK and Germany. In the teledermatology field, the USA was the first country again with 206 papers (36%) followed by the UK and Australia (104 and 50 papers, respectively). The most productive countries in telemedicine were Cyprus (30.03), Norway (28.19), and Australia (19.61). Austria ranked first (4.94) in terms of productivity in teledermatology followed by Norway (3.13), New Zealand (2.43), and Australia (2.13). A high correlation was found between number of publications and 2013 gross domestic product values of 60 countries ( r = 0.804, p < 0.001 for telemedicine and r = 0.721, p < 0.001 for teledermatology). A high correlation was detected between the number of telemedicine publications and gross domestic product per hour worked ( r = 0.712, p < 0.001) although moderate correlation was measured in teledermatology field ( r = 0.558, p < 0.05). We found a significant correlation between number of publications and human development index ( r = 0.779, p < 0.001 for telemedicine and r = 0.767, p < 0.001 for teledermatology). Most items have been published from high-income, developed countries. Thus the physicians in undeveloped and developing countries, in which telemedicine and teledermatology applications are crucial to deliver medical care and services, should be encouraged to perform novel studies.