A Bibliometric and Trend Analysis on the Water-Related Risk Assessment Studies for Cryptosporidium Pathogen

Background: The bibliometric methods have been used in many disciplines of sciences to study the scientific production and research trends. In this study, they were used to investigate research trends related to the risk assessment of Cryptosporidium pathogen in water field. Methods: Data were obtained on the Scopus database from 1993 to 2013. Research tendency was investigated by analyzing the distribution of languages, countries, journals, author keywords, authorship pattern and co-authorship relations. Results: The English language was dominant language of all publications (96.36%). Number of articles in this field increased from 2 in 1993 to 29 papers in 2007 and then received to 19 at the end of 2013. United States produced 35.41% of all pertinent articles followed by United Kingdom with 10.76% and Australia with 9.92%. Water Research Journal published the most papers in this field, taking 11.62% of all, followed by Journal of Water and Health (10.92%) and Water Science and Technology (10.21%). The most productive authors were Ashbolt NJ form Canada that accounts about 1.51% of the total publications followed by Rose JB and Haas CN from United States. Authorship pattern analysis results show that literature does follow Lotka’s law (P=0.627). Conclusion: A downward trend in the number of publications is likely to occur in future. The results of this bibliometric analysis may help relevant researchers realize the scope of the microbial risk assessment research of Cryptosporidium, and establish the further research direction.