World scientific collaboration in coronary heart disease research

doi:10.1016/j.ijcard.2012.09.134

International Journal of Cardiology

Volume 167, Issue 3, 10 August 2013, Pages 631-639

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcard.2012.09.134 Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

Coronary heart disease (CHD) will continue to exert a heavy burden for countries all over the world. Scientific collaboration has become the only choice for progress in biomedicine. Unfortunately, there is a scarcity of scientific publications about scientific collaboration in CHD research. This study examines collaboration behaviors across multiple collaboration types in the CHD research.

Methods

294,756 records about CHD were retrieved from Web of Science. Methods such as co-authorship, social network analysis, connected component, cliques, and betweenness centrality were used in this study.

Results

Collaborations have increased at the author, institution and country/region levels in CHD research over the past three decades. 3000 most collaborative authors, 572 most collaborative institutions and 52 countries/regions are extracted from their corresponding collaboration network. 766 cliques are found in the most collaborative authors. 308 cliques are found in the most collaborative institutions. Western countries/regions represent the core of the world's collaboration. The United States ranks first in terms of number of multi-national publications, while Hungary leads in the ranking measured by their proportion of collaborative output. The rate of economic development in the countries/regions also affects the multi-national collaboration behavior.

Conclusions

Collaborations among countries/regions need to be encouraged in the CHD research. The visualization of overlapping cliques in the most collaborative authors and institutions are considered “skeleton” of the collaboration network. Eastern countries/regions should strengthen cooperation with western countries/regions in the CHD research.

Introduction

Coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality has been continuously decreasing in many countries as a result of changes in risk factors and evidence based treatments over the past three decades [1], [2], [3], [4], [5].

Nevertheless, because of population aging and lifestyle changes, such as long work time, unhealthy nutrition habits, stress and lack of recreation, CHD will continue to exert a heavy burden for countries all over the world. According to the data from the WHO [6], cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the number one cause of death globally: more people die annually from CVDs than from any other causes. An estimated 17.3 million people died from CVDs in 2008, representing 30% of all global deaths. Of these deaths, an estimated 7.3 million were due to CHD.

This situation has always been a major issue of global concern, and has mounted a serious challenge for researchers in life sciences worldwide to prevent and control CHD and for governments to allocate funding to CHD research. However, no single individual can perform all of the specialist tasks with the increasing specialization and professionalization in biomedicine. Scientific collaboration becomes the only choice for progress in biomedicine because it allows sharing resources and promotes synergies to achieve the necessary critical mass of knowledge.

Unfortunately, few scientific publications about scientific collaboration in CHD research were reported. Our aim is therefore to examine collaboration behaviors across multiple collaboration types in the CHD research.

Section snippets

Materials

The documents which contain the word “coronary” in their title, abstract or keywords were collected from the scientific literature database, known as “Web of Science”. The scope was limited to the years 1981 through 2010. All documents regardless of type (e.g., article, meeting abstract, proceedings paper, review, editorial material, book review, letter, note, etc.) were processed. Only documents from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded) were taken into account. The query yielded

Scientific productivity

There has been a substantial increase in the total number of papers in CHD research over the past three decades, as depicted in Fig. 1. Fig. 1 shows distribution of publications per year. The number of publications in CHD research remained approximately constant during the 1980s, then started to shoot upward since 1989. Overall, the number of papers has increased more than eightfold, from 2436 in 1981 to 20,741 in 2010.

Multi-author collaboration

Collaboration among scientists in CHD research has significantly grown over

Discussion

Collaborations have increased at the author, institution and country/region levels as supported by a number of studies [9], [13], [16], [17]. However, little attention is paid to the collaboration in the CHD research. The CHD research can be classified as high collaboration area at the author level, with 93% of publications all over the world multi-authored in 2010. However, the rate of the other two types of collaborations is relatively lower, especially international collaboration. Although

Study limitations

There are several limitations in our study. This study focuses mainly on the research collaboration behaviors among authors, institutions and countries/regions in CHD research. But how is the research collaboration related with the research quality of the authors? Does multi-national or multi-institutional collaboration result in higher citations? All of these need to be investigated in future study.

Conclusions

In conclusion, this study provides a global description of collaboration behaviors across multiple collaboration types in the CHD research. The data provided are informative for the scholars in this field as well as policy makers and administrators for managing and financing CHD research in the future.

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^☆: Grant support: The research reported in this paper was done as part of the ‘Cooperation Analysis of Technology Innovation Team Member Based on Knowledge Network—Empirical Evidence in the Biology and Biomedicine Field’ (No. 71103114), supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China. And it was also supported by Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-08-0887).

¹: This author takes responsibility for all aspects of the reliability and freedom from bias of the data presented and their discussed interpretation.

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World scientific collaboration in coronary heart disease research☆

Abstract

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Introduction

Section snippets

Materials

Scientific productivity

Multi-author collaboration

Discussion

Study limitations

Conclusions

Int J Cardiol

Aust N Z J Public Health

Analysing the large decline in coronary heart disease mortality in the Icelandic population aged 25–74 between the years 1981 and 2006

PLoS One

Risk factor and treatment contributions to the coronary heart disease mortality decline in a low risk Mediterranean population: Spain 1988–2005

J Epidemiol Community Health

Patterns of coronary heart disease mortality over the 20th century in England and Wales: possible plateaus in the rate of decline

BMC Public Health

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs)

Studying research collaboration using co-authorships

Scientometrics

Bibliometric studies of research collaboration — a review

J Inf Sci