scientometric study and visualization of multiple sclerosis-related publications during 1999-2008

introduction: the purpose of this study was to visualize the scientific structure of multiple sclerosis (ms) during 1999-2008 and to use scientometric indicators for analysis of ms-related scientific publications indexed in web of science database. methods: this survey tried to visualize data as a scientometric method. a total number of 17737 ms-related articles published during 1999-2008 were extracted from web of science database and saved as text files on personal computers. the files were then analyzed by isi.exe, microsoft excel and histcite. results: the highest number of the extracted articles was published in 2008 (12.85%). the articles published have been in 17 languages, with english possessing the highest proportion (94.63%). authors' collaboration coefficient (cc) raised from 0.71 in 1999 to 0.76 in 2008. articles with 2 to 6 authors had the highest frequency (60.6%). according to lotka's law, more than 70% of authors (8824 author) have published one article while a small number (n = 64) have published 10 to 40 articles. about 10 universities and institutions (15.63%) participated in the production of 15.63% of articles. harvard university produced 2.41% of the publications and stood the first. the united states produced 6370 articles (36%) and ranked the first and the united kingdom, germany and italy ranked the second to the fourth, respectively. mean number of citations among the 100 effective articles was 324. conclusion: the results showed that 95% of the articles have been published in english. despite the participation of different countries in the production of articles, more than one third of articles have been produced in the united states. according to the results, 10 countries have published more than 97% of the articles and harvard university had the highest frequency. ten journals have published 4845 article (27.30%). lotka's law was confirmed and the collaboration coefficient (cc) was equal to 0.739 which indicates the growing trend of cooperation. finally, by histcite was used to draw the scientific map based on which effective authors and thematic clusters were determined.