Priority Development Subject Areas of Global Medical Science

Introduction. One of the tools that allows to assess the relevance of initiated or ongoing scientific studies is the scientometric analysis of their topics. The method is actively and widely used not only for rating models based on various bibliometric indicators and parameters, as well as for evaluating the publication activity of authors, organizations, scientific publications, cities, and countries. Russia and other countries have amassed extensive experience rating accomplishments in scientific and educational fields, specifically using numerous scientometric indicators to assess scientific effectiveness and productivity. The article compiles a scientometric rating of the subject areas covered by “Medicine” in order to identify the priority development directions of global medical science. Materials and methods. The study was conducted in the “Medicine” section using the SciVal analytical platform, which uses data from the international scientific citation database Scopus. Four scientometric indicators (scholarly output, citation count, citation per output and field-weighted citation impact) were analyzed for a three-year period from 2019 to 2021. Results and discussion. The paper presents a table method for determining the worldwide priority directions of scientific research in medicine. For each of the four scientometric indicators, the TOP-5 subject areas have been identified, the list of which is approximately the same in terms of scholarly output and citation count, but significantly differs in citation per output and field-weighted citation impact. Conclusion. The TOP-5 of four scientometric indicators for the period 2019–2021 includes twelve subject areas, such as cardiology and cardiovascular medicine, oncology, surgery, infectious diseases, epidemiology, medical microbiology, public health, etc. The data obtained during the study confirm the strong thematic correlation between publications in certain subject areas. The algorithm described in the paper can be further adopted on local, organizational, regional, and national levels, i. e. in organizations, cities, and countries. This methodology seems to be promising in identifying and analyzing priority areas of scientific research and determining the index of scientific specialization of certain groups of countries, for example, BRICS, G7, G20, EU, ASEAN, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Eurasian Economic Union, etc.