Mapping the landscape of neuroscience research trend(s) in South Asia: A bibliometric analysis of 25 years (1995–2019)

In depth analysis of publication trends can help in finding out strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement. South Asia (SA), with its unique demographic and epidemiological characteristics, is considered a valuable region for health research, particularly in neuroscience. There is a clear need of data which should reflect heterogenous neuroscience research outputs of the SA region and help in devising new trends to boost its research landscape. The present study aimed to analyse the neuroscience research trend in SA during the recent 25 years (1995 to 2019). A total of 85,796 articles were retrieved from PubMed using 7 keywords in combination with the SA country’s name. These articles were filtered by removing paper not falling in neurosciences. We compared important metrics of these articles from SA countries. Moreover, data from SA countries were compared with data (extracted similarly) from 4 developed countries i.e., Germany, USA, UK, and Japan (750 articles each). The metrics compared include, journal impact factor (IF), number of authors, citations, funding, collaborations, and research categories. This unique dataset has shown that SA is although, making a lot of progress in neuroscience research, still there is a need for further improvement especially in funding, publications in high IF journals, and the use of advanced cutting-edge technologies. Our study helps in highlighting important gaps and making crucial recommendations to promote neuroscience in the region.