A bibliometric analysis of global Ebola research.

17 Philippines 52 Scopus 18 Australia 50 SCI 19 Spain 46 SCI 20 Netherlands 44 SCI Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), a severe and potentially lethal infection, has emerged as a global threat [1]. In light of the current epidemic, which has rapidly evolved since March 2014, most of the affected countries such as Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have reported over 21,000 cases with approximately 8300 reported deaths (as of December 2014). Furthermore, the unprecedented spread of imported cases to other nations such as Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Spain, United Kingdom and United States of America (USA), has generated great concern prompting not only an important steady stream of media coverage [2] but also a groundbreaking impact on research and publications on the disease. In order to assess the current impact on Ebola related scientific production across the world, a bibliometric analysis was conducted using available information deposited at major biomedical and multidisciplinary journalsindexing databases, such as Science Citation Index (SCI), Scopus and Medline (using GoPubMed ). As our search strategy, data on indexed articles was retrieved from those databases using the term “Ebola” as a main operator for analytical purposes. A total of 7262 Ebola-associated items were retrieved in our search. At Scopus, 2922 articles were recovered (12.3% from Congo, 7.2% USA and 5.4% Guinea), followed by SCI with 2297 articles (55.2% from USA, 11.2% Germany and 7.9% Canada) and Medline with 2043 articles (27.9% from USA, 11.7% Congo and 6.5% Guinea) (Table 1), with the USA returning the greatest level of output. In addition, 7.3%, 16.7% and 14.8% of the articles respectively were published in 2014 (up to November). For Medline, the annual median number of articles up to 2013 was 43 (interquartile range [IQR] 9e83). However