The Trend of Scientific Publications of the Top 20 Productive Countries in the Field of Public, Environmental and Occupational Health - Abstract
Objective: This study was devoted to clustering the growth of research outputs among the top-ranking 20 countries in the field of public, environmental and occupational health. Method: This is a longitudinal bibliometric study that uses SCImago Journal & Country Rank information about scientific published documents in the field of public, environmental and occupational health from 2000 to 2018. To identify the main patterns, the growth mixture model was implemented and the optimum number of patterns was obtained based on the likelihood ratio test (LRT) in Mplus 7.4 software. Results: The overall trend in the number of published scientific documents was raising with an annual growth of 7.65%. The United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) had a higher level of contribution to published documents. The model with three patterns was introduced as the model with the best fit using LRT. The first pattern of published documents, including Germany, Australia, Canada, Japan, France, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Brazil, Spain, India, Russian Federation, Switzerland, Denmark, China, South Africa, South Korea and Iran, had a slow growth with the mean annual increase of 74 documents. The US with an annual growth of 598 documents had a very sharp rising trend and, as the third identified pattern, the UK experienced a moderate growth with an annual increase of 156 documents. Conclusions: The proposed model confirmed that annual growths of the published documents in the field of public, environmental and occupational health in the US and UK are significantly higher than in other countries in this field.