Bibliometrics of the Global Drug Abuse Research Output as Reflected by Coverage in Web of Science Core Collection during 2011-2018

Drug abuse is a serious public health problem that causes several social problems. The paper presents a bibliometric analysis of 16,745 papers published on drug abuse research during 2011-2018 and indexed by the Web of Science core collection. The study examines the pattern of drug research output during the study period; identifies most productive countries, institutions and authors and examines the impact of their output. Among the key findings are that the research output from 2014 shows a downward trend in spite of drug abuse increasing worldwide. Research activity as indication by publication output is found to be highly concentrated among the advanced economy (higher income) countries of the world with USA topping the list contributing more than half of the publication output. The value of Citation per Paper (CPP) which indicates to some extent how paper is valued by the research community showed that UK and the Netherlands had highest values of this indicator. University of California Systems (USA) followed by Harvard University (USA) topped the list of most productive institutions. The distribution of citations indicates that about one per cent papers received 100 or more citations.The pattern of communication of the scholars indicates that the total output was scattered among 2469 journals originating from 61 countries. More than three-fourth (76.5%) of these journals were published from three countries, namely USA (48.7%) followed by UK (23.1%) and the Netherlands (4.7%).The study indicates no correlation between death rate of a country due to drug abuse with its publications output. The study points out that research need to focus on countries that have high drug abuse which are increasingly observed in developing and marginalized economies. It calls for mechanisms to support research in developing and marginalised economies as drug abuse is so prevalent in these countries.