Abstract
BackgroundTropical medicine appeared as a distinct sub-discipline in the late nineteenth century, during a period of rapid European colonial expansion in Africa and Asia. After a dramatic drop after World War II, research on tropical diseases have received more attention and research funding in the twenty-first century.MethodsWe used Apache Taverna to integrate Europe PMC and MapAffil web services, containing the spatiotemporal analysis workflow from a list of PubMed queries to a list of publication years and author affiliations geoparsed to latitudes and longitudes. The results could then be visualized in the Quantum Geographic Information System (QGIS).ResultsOur workflows automatically matched 253,277 affiliations to geographical coordinates for the first authors of 379,728 papers on tropical diseases in a single execution. The bibliometric analyses show how research output in tropical diseases follow major historical shifts in the twentieth century and renewed interest in and funding for tropical disease research in the twenty-first century. They show the effects of disease outbreaks, WHO eradication programs, vaccine developments, wars, refugee migrations, and peace treaties.ConclusionsLiterature search and geoparsing web services can be combined in scientific workflows performing a complete spatiotemporal bibliometric analyses of research in tropical medicine. The workflows and datasets are freely available and can be used to reproduce or refine the analyses and test specific hypotheses or look into particular diseases or geographic regions. This work exceeds all previously published bibliometric analyses on tropical diseases in both scale and spatiotemporal range.
Highlights
Tropical medicine appeared as a distinct sub-discipline in the late nineteenth century, during a period of rapid European colonial expansion in Africa and Asia
Tropical medicine first appeared as a distinct sub-discipline and professional specialization toward the end of the nineteenth century, and the heyday of tropical medicine coincided with European colonialism in Africa and Asia around this time
What are the global and historical trends in tropical medicine research, and how do recent outbreaks, attention, and funding compare in these contexts? What else can be learned from broad, spatiotemopral bibliometric analyses?
Summary
Tropical medicine appeared as a distinct sub-discipline in the late nineteenth century, during a period of rapid European colonial expansion in Africa and Asia. Tropical medicine first appeared as a distinct sub-discipline and professional specialization toward the end of the nineteenth century, and the heyday of tropical medicine coincided with European colonialism in Africa and Asia around this time. After the decades following World War II, recent years have seen an increasing attention and significant funding to combat tropical diseases in an increasingly globalized world. We attempt to visualize these and other aspects of the history of tropical medicine by spatiotemporal bibliometric analyses. This is not the first bibliometric venture into the history of research on tropical diseases. What are the global and historical trends in tropical medicine research, and how do recent outbreaks, attention, and funding compare in these contexts? What else can be learned from broad, spatiotemopral bibliometric analyses?
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