Trends of High-Impact Studies in Pharmacology and Pharmacy: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Lingmin Chen,Yi Yang,Nian Li,Yonggang Zhang,Jin Fan

doi:10.3389/fphar.2021.726668

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the trends of high-impact studies in pharmacology and pharmacy research and to provide evidence for future research in the field of pharmacology and pharmacy.Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed to understand the current status of high-impact studies (top 1%) in pharmacology and pharmacy research via InCites tool based on Web of Science Core Collection. VOSViewer software was used to visualize the results. The outcomes included development trends, countries, subject areas, research institutes, collaborative networks, and subject terms.Results: We found 4,273 high-impact (top 1%) studies between 2011 and 2020 in the field of pharmacology and pharmacy. The number of studies increased from 366 in 2011 to 510 in 2020. These studies were mainly distributed in the following Web of Science subject categories: pharmacology and pharmacy (n = 4,188); neurosciences (n = 397); chemistry, multidisciplinary (n = 359); chemistry, medicinal (n = 314); microbiology (n = 301); biotechnology and applied microbiology (n = 280). These studies were cited in 646,855 studies from more than 100 Web of Science subject categories, and studies in pharmacology pharmacy accounted for the largest share of these citations. The top three countries that contributed the highest number of studies were the United States, United Kingdom, and China. The top three institutions that contributed the highest number of studies in the United States were the University of California System, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Harvard University. The top research collaborative circle was from universities in the United States. The top international collaborative circle was from universities from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and China. The subject-term analysis indicated that cancer was still the top disease, NF-κB was the top signaling pathway, and drug-delivery and nanoparticles were the top methods.Conclusion: The high-impact studies in pharmacology and pharmacy research have grown over time. The United States, the United Kingdom, and China are the top countries that contributed the high-impact studies. Cancer is still the greatest challenge in the field of disease treatment. It calls for more international collaboration in pharmacology and pharmacy research, which will help discover novel drugs.

Highlights

Pharmacology is the study of the sources, uses, and mechanisms of action of drugs (Reidenberg, 1991; Barnes et al, 2005)
The inclusion criteria were as follows: 1) the research category should be “pharmacology and pharmacy” when using the InCites tool based on the Web of Science Core Collection (Zhu et al, 2020); 2) the article type should be article or review; 3) studies should be in the top 1%; 4) studies should be published in the past 10 years, from 2011 to 2020
The exclusion criteria were as follows: 1) article type was editorial, correction, or other types; 2) studies could not be found in the Web of Science Core Collection

Summary

Introduction

Pharmacology is the study of the sources, uses, and mechanisms of action of drugs (Reidenberg, 1991; Barnes et al, 2005). Trends of a research field are usually reflected by highimpact studies (Hollenberg et al, 2020). Analyzing these high-impact studies could help us identify the research trends and foresee the potential developments in this research field (Chen et al, 2020; De Serrano, 2017; Zhu et al, 2020). A nursing study by Zhu et al (2020) has analyzed the high-impact studies in nursing based on the InCites database and provided references for the nursing managers in the research field. There is no comprehensive analysis of the high-impact studies in pharmacology and pharmacy

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion