Stroke in the Arab World: A bibliometric analysis of research activity (2002–2016)

BACKGROUND: The Arab world has an increasing prevalence of strokes, a leading cause of death in this part of the world. AIMS: The aim of this article is to quantify the stroke research activity in the Arab countries over the past 15 years taking into consideration the population, GDP, and DALY of each country. METHODS: A PubMed search was conducted to find stroke research articles published from the Arab countries between 2002 and 2016 (inclusive). Medical subject headings related to strokes and author origin/affiliation were used for this purpose. RESULTS: The Arab world only produced 0.51% of all the stroke-related publications on PubMed even though the stroke-related DALY percentage in this region was greater than 2.88% during the period we studied. In general, the number of publications increased in the last few years. Somalia came first regarding the percentage of stroke to non-stroke publications released. Lebanon had the highest number of publications per GDP (in US Billion Dollars), Qatar had the highest number of publications per million persons (PPMP), while Saudi Arabia had the highest number of publications per 1% of stroke DALY. In addition, a strong positive correlation was found between the number of stroke publications and GDP; however, the correlation between the number of stroke publication and either population size or DALY was a weak positive one. CONCLUSIONS: A general increase in publications is noticed, but stroke research activity in the Arab world is still poor compared to other parts of the world.