Trends in the scientific literature on atypical antipsychotic drugs in the United Kingdom: a bibliometric study

OBJECTIVE: A bibliometric study was undertaken of peer-reviewed publications on atypical antipsychotic drugs (AADs) from the United Kingdom and the findings are presented herein. METHODS: We selected the documents from the Scopus database. We applied several production and dispersion bibliometric indicators, including Price’s law on the growth of the scientific literature, and Bradford’s law. We also calculated a so-called ‘participation index’ across different countries. The bibliometric data were thereafter correlated with social and health data from the UK, including total per capita expenditure on health and gross domestic expenditure. RESULTS: A total of 4156 original manuscripts were published within the timeframe 1967–2015. Our results are in accord with Price’s law, with scientific output demonstrating exponential growth (r = 0.9227, as against an r = 0.8766 after adjustment). The drugs most widely evaluated were clozapine (465 documents), olanzapine (263) and risperidone (248). Stratification into Bradford zones produced a nucleus represented by the Journal of Psychopharmacology (168 articles) and British Journal of Psychiatry (159 articles). A total of 1250 different journals were evaluated. CONCLUSIONS: Publications on AADs in the UK have shown exponential growth across the studied period, which is in line with the progressively burgeoning novel AAD releases. No evidence of a saturation point was observed.