Hip replacement surgery: A scientometric assessment of global publications output during 2007-16

The present study examined 4884 global hip replacement surgery publications, as indexed in Scopus database during 2007-16, with a view to understand their growth rate, global 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 characteristics of high cited papers. The global publications registered an annual average growth rate of 4.98% and its citation impact averaged to 12.11 citations per paper. The global share of top 10 most productive countries ranged from 3.24% to 28.52%, with largest global publication share coming from USA (28.52%), followed by UK (13.53%), etc. Together, the top 10 most productive countries accounted for 80.51% global publication share during 2007-16, increasing from 80.04% to 80.82% from 2007-11 to 2012-16. The international collaborative publications share of top 10 countries varied from 10.45% to 39.05%, with the highest share coming from Canada (39.05%), followed by Australia (37.37%), Germany (29.61%), Netherlands (28.40%), France  (27.87%), U.K. (27.84%), Italy (27.81%), etc. Among seven broad subjects, medicine contributed the largest publications share of 93.08%, followed by engineering (7.47%), biochemistry, genetics & molecular biology (5.55%) etc. during 2007-16. Among various organizations and authors contributing to hip replacement surgery, the 20 most productive global organizations and authors together contributed 20.86% and 10.24% respectively as their share of global publication output and 29.69% and 18.42% respectively as their share of global citation output. Among 4776 journal papers in hip replacement surgery research, the top 15 most productive journals contributed 40.10% share of total journal publication output during 2007-16, 37.61% to 41.76% from 2007-11 and 2012-16. 64 publications were found to be high cited, as they registered citations from 100 to 806 during 2007-16 and they together received 11683 citations, which averaged to 182.55 citations per paper.