Ocimum sanctum (Medicinal plant) research: A scientometric assessment of global publications output during 2008–17

Abstract

The present study examined 1306 global publications in Ocimum Sanctum, as covered in multidisciplinary Scopus bibliographical database during 2008-17, with a view to understand their growth rate, global share, citation impact, international collaborative papers share, distribution of publications by broad subjects, productivity and citation profile of top organizations and authors, preferred media of communication and bibliographic characteristics of high cited papers. The global publications registered an annual average growth rate of 11.85% and its citation impact averaged to 8.84 citations per paper. Among the top 10 most productive countries, India contributed the global share of more than 79.94% and other top 9 countries global share ranged from 1.0% to 3.37% only. 96.48% of the cumulative global publication share comes from top 10 countries Pharmacology, Toxicology & Pharmaceutics, among seven broad subjects, contributed the largest publications share of 44.41%. Among various organizations and authors contributing to global Ocimum Sanctum research, the 15 most productive global organizations and authors together contributed 15.54% and 6.13% global publication share and 17.67% and 13.14% global citation share respectively. Amongst 1259 journal papers (in 145 journals) in global Ocimum Sanctum research, the top 15 most productive journals contributed 24.94% share of total journal publication output. 18 publications were found to be high cited, as they registered citations from 81 to 213 during 2008-17 and they together received 1969 citations, which averaged to 109.39 citations per paper. It is suggested that the above analysis will help the policy-makers and scholars to explore the full potential of Ocimum Sanctum in preventing and treating diseases and also to identify future research areas in this field.