Curcuma longa (Medicinal Plant) Research: A Scientometric Assessment of Global Publications Output during 1997-2016

The present study examined 5351 global publications in Curcuma longa as covered in international Scopus database during 1997-2016, with a view to understand their growth rate, global publication 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 13.40% and its citation impact averaged to 29.04 citations per paper. Among the top 15 countries, the global share ranged from 1.91% to 31.04%, with India contributing the largest share of 31.04%, followed by USA (13.96%), China (11.55%), etc. 92.66% and 96.84% of the cumulative global publication and citation share comes from top 15 countries during 1997-2016, showing increase in publication share from 89.25% to 93.62% from 1997-2006 to 2007-17. Five countries registered relative citation index above the world average of 1.05: USA (2.29), U.K. (2.08), Taiwan (1.81), Italy (1.23) and South Korea (1.10) during 1997-2016. Medicine, among seven broad subjects, contributed the largest publications share of 37.38%, followed by pharmacology, toxicology and pharmaceutics (32.07%), biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology (31.68%), agricultural and biological sciences (25.53%), chemistry (12.78%), etc. during 1997-16 Among various organizations and authors contributing to global Curcuma longa research, the 20 most productive global organizations and authors together contributed 13.89% and 5.59% global publication share and 20.75% and 14.25% global citation share respectively during 1997-2016. Amongst 5157 journal papers (in 2216 journals) in global Curcuma longa research, the top 20 most productive journals contributed 15.92% share of total journal publication output during 1997-2016. Three hundred forty (340) publications were found to be high cited, as they registered citations from 100 to 3869 during 1997-2016 and they together received 81274 citations, which averaged to 239.04 citations per paper. It is suggested that developing countries need to increase their efforts in investment in R & D to increase their output and also to perform better in terms of quality of research.