International publication trends in dry eye disease research: A bibliometric analysis.

Purpose: To perform a bibliometric analysis in the field of dry eye disease (DED) research to characterize the current international status of DED research and to identify the most effective actors (journals, countries, authors) involved in this field.

Methods: Scientometric methods were used to evaluate global scientific production and development trends in DED research, using the Web of Science Core Collection.

Results: The growth of the literature related to DED averaged 12.18% over the last 10 years. A total of 5522 original and review articles, published in 821 different journals, were identified. The USA was the most productive country with 34.53% of the overall articles studied and 46.10% of the overall citations. The Ocular Surface published a very high percentage of articles related to DED relative to the total number of articles published (31.87%). The most productive institutions and the most frequently cited articles were from the USA and Japan. A network visualization map for country collaboration revealed that most European countries developed most of their collaborations with countries belonging to their own continent, which was not the case for the USA or Japan. A total of 41,956 KeyWords Plus were found with an average of 7.6 (SD = 3.15) KeyWords Plus per article.

Conclusions: This study provides a broad view of the current status and trends in DED research and may help clinicians, researchers and policy makers better understand this research field and predict its dynamic directions.