Chinese research into ulcerative colitis from 1978 to 2017:A bibliometric analysis

BACKGROUND Over the last 40 years,with accumulating evidence demonstrating a significant increase in the incidence of ulcerative colitis(UC)in China,the number of studies on UC has been rapidly increasing.But it still lacks a comprehensive metaanalysis of publications regarding UC for the last four decades in China.Thus,a bibliometric analysis of UC is warranted to investigate the trend and distribution of the publications on UC in China in recent years.And it is supposed that the number of the papers related to UC increased by year.AIM To investigate the current status of research output from Chinese studies related to UC during the period of 1978 to 2017,with special attention paid to the distribution of publication dates,journals,regions,and research organizations.METHODS Publications on UC were searched in the Chinese periodical database SinoMed from January 1978 to December 2017.The search term used for retrieval was“ulcerative colitis”.The language of the publications was restricted to English or Chinese.The studies have to be performed in China.Then,a bibliometric analysis was performed on the distribution of publication dates,journals,regions,and research organizations with EndNote,Excel,MySQL,and GraphPad Prism.RESULTS A total of 16257 papers matched the search criteria,which included 7561 papers published in core journals,4641 evidence-based articles,and 4177 publications of randomized controlled trials.These papers were mainly published in Chinese Journal of Coloproctology,World Chinese Journal of Digestology,Chinese Journal of Digestion,Chinese Journal of Integrated Traditional and Western Medicine on Digestion,and Modern Journal of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine.In particular,the majority of these organizations were located in Jiangsu,Henan,Shandong,and Guangdong Provinces which are rich areas or have the largest population per province.Most of these studies were conducted by academic institutions.CONCLUSION Over the past four decades,the output of research into UC in China has increased significantly,with academic institutions playing a central role in the academic field,but the number and quality of these researches vary substantially among different regions.