Abstract
<p><strong>Background.</strong> Cannabis has been a topic of political and medical controversy in many countries over the past century. Although many publications on this topic are available, there is currently no comprehensive evaluation of global research activities in the field.</p><p><strong>Objective.</strong> This study was conducted in order to provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the worldwide research output on cannabis. <strong></strong></p><p><strong>Methods. </strong>In a quantitative approach, items concerning cannabis published between 1900 and 2008 were retrieved from the ISI Web of Science databases developed by the Thompson Institute of Scientific Information and analysed using scientometric methods. In a second step, research fields of growing interest were identified.<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Results.</strong> We found that publications on this topic increased during the late 1960s, as well as during the period 1990 - 2008. We noted that South Africa was one of the countries with a high research output, having published numerous articles on cannabis. A comparison of cannabis with other drugs (e.g. alcohol, tobacco, cocaine and heroin) showed that in relation to the proportion of respective drug users, cocaine and heroin are overly represented in terms of research output. When analysing the main subjects of the publications, psychiatry was prominent, especially with regard to research on psychosis.</p><p><strong>Conclusion.</strong> There is increasing interest in research on cannabis. The research only partially reflects the drug’s importance with regard to number of users.</p>
Highlights
Cannabis has been a topic of political and medical controversy in many countries over the past century
Taking into account that there are differences in the way data are collected and processed, we used the available statistical data from the EU and the USA as a measure of current use of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, cocaine and heroin.[28,29,30,31,32]. Using these estimates we found that the research output for alcohol compared with cannabis reflected numbers of users of these drugs
When analysing publications according to country of origin, we unexpectedly found South Africa’s research output comparable to that of the most prolific countries
Summary
Items concerning cannabis published between 1900 and 2008 were retrieved from the ISI Web of Science databases developed by the Thompson Institute of Scientific Information and analysed using scientometric methods. Research fields of growing interest were identified. The data for this project were retrieved from the Web of Science (ISI-Web) database of the Thomson Institute for Scientific Information.[16,17]. The time span analysed was from 1900 to 2008. The year 2009 was not included because not all publications for that year were available at the time of assessment. For the searches on alcohol, tobacco, cocaine and heroin, the time span was limited to 1990 - 2008. A clear increase in papers on cannabis during this time could be illustrated accurately, and it was possible to compare the literature on cannabis with increases in publications on the other substances listed above
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