ABSTRACT
Oral submucous fibrosis is being recognized now as a chronic, insidious, premalignant condition affecting the mucosa of oral cavity, pharynx and the portion of upper oesophagus. Characteristically, it shows epithelial and sub-epithelial inflammation followed by fibro-elastic alterations in sub-mucosal region thereby leading to difficulty in opening mouth. Thus, stiffness of oral mucosa causes trismus and inability to eat. If untreated at earliest, it can progress to squamous cell carcinoma. Wardha is the smallest district in Maharashtra and a significant number of cases of oral submucous fibrosis and oral cancer are reported at the tertiary care hospital of the Health Sciences University. This study was conducted to shed light on the Scientific Productions of this Health Sciences University in Central India regarding cancers and oral submucous fibrosis over the period of last 15 years. METHODSThe Scopus and Web of Science databases were accessed, and the publications affiliated to the University were retrieved using the specified search query. The publications thus accessed were imported as BibText and RIS files and checked for duplicates in both databases. Duplicates were removed, and the final list of publications was prepared. Data related to finalised publications was imported to R-Studio application for producing the graphs and plots related to the number of scientific productions. RESULTSThe search generated a data of a total of 191 documents from 71 Sources (Journals, Books, etc.) for the period from 2007 – 2020. The number of authors included a list of 1356 authors. Authors of single-authored documents were 6; whereas, authors of multi-authored documents were 1350. Thus, there were 7.1 authors per document, 9.13 co-authors per document. The Collaboration Index was 7.3. Average citations per document was 37. CONCLUSIONSThe university has contributed significantly to the scientific literature on oral submucous fibrosis.