Аnalysis of studies presented in articles on mitigation of biomedical consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant worldwide (1986–2018)

Abstract

A lack of accessible information about the demand for domestic articles on the mitigation of consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the early post-accident period necessitates referring to publications presented in international bibliographic databases, which can be a good help in planning research and preparing publications. The intention is an analysis of articles in the field of eliminating the biomedical consequences of the Chernobyl accident in the world and in Russia, indexed in the Scopus database in 1986–2018. A search query gave an array of 3929 articles in Scopus. The largest number of articles was published by authors from the USA (13.2%), Ukraine (12.6%) and Russia (12.2%). A significant number of articles were published by international authors. The average annual number of articles was (119±6) in the whole array and (15±2) in the Russian array. In the whole array, 11.5% of the articles dealt with the biomedical problems of the liquidators of the consequences of the Chernobyl accident; 12.5% – the population living in the radioactively-contaminated territories; 18.7% – neoplasms; 8.6% – medical radiation physics; 21.2% – radioecology; 12.0% – biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology. In the Russian array, these respective percentages were 19.8, 17.3, 18.1, 21.7, 18.8% and 10.2%. On average, there were 10.5 citations per article, 70% of the articles were at least once cited, self-citations made up to 17.6%, and the Hirsch index was 81. A quite high demand for articles in the field of eliminating the biomedical consequences of the Chernobyl accident has been revealed among the world scientific community. Russian scientists should form a habit of quoting articles from their colleagues more often. Some domestic magazines still have a low publishing culture. A lack of transliterated lists of references not only precludes from indexing articles in Scopus, but also interferes with citing research papers from domestic scientists, their affiliated research institutions, and Russia as a whole.