Productivity, Collaboration and Impact of Cuban Scientific Research on Parkinson's Disease in Scopus

Abstract

Introduction: Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in the world. This fact, in addition to the role of Scopus as a high-quality bibliometric data source, Cuba’s privileged position among Latin American countries in terms of neuroscientific output, and the absence of bibliometric studies on Parkinson’s disease in this context motivated the present study. Objective: to evaluate the productivity, collaboration, and impact of Cuban scientific research on Parkinson’s disease indexed in Scopus between 2012 and 2021. Methods: a descriptive bibliometric study was performed on 84 articles that had at least one author with a Cuban institutional affiliation. Indicators of productivity, collaboration and impact were used. Results: the highest output corresponded to the journals Neuroscience and Behavioral Sciences (5 documents each). Parkinsonism and Related Disorders led in terms of number of citations (NC=201) and average number of citations per paper (ANC=67). The year with the highest productivity was 2019 (Ndoc=13). Articles represented 69 % of the documents. Of the 11 most productive authors, 6 were major producers and only one of them is Cuban. The top funding sponsor was Medicinska Forskningsrådet. The Subramanyan’s index was 98,8. The top contributing country was Spain (Ndoc = 25). International collaboration was the most common (79,8 %). The publications reached 1 592 citations. The h-index was 22. Conclusions: the scientific output was scarce, tended to be in quantitative decline, had few major Cuban producers, presented a high rate of international collaboration, and achieved a notable scientific impact.