Bibliometric analysis of recent research on multidrug and antibiotics resistance (2017–2018)

ABSTRACT

Antibiotic resistance is considered, nowadays, as a severe public health problem. In February 2017, the World HealthOrganization (WHO) reported the global priority list of antibiotic-resistant bacteria as a guide for further researchon the field. This contribution presents a bibliometric overview of global research on multidrug and antibioticsresistance. Research articles indexed between 2017 and 2018 on the Scopus database were filtered according to asystematic search strategy and a total of 2,362 records were retrieved. A significative number of studies were foundto be focused on four pathogenic bacteria Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter baumannii, andKlebsiella pneumoniae, which were also included in the critical priority level according to the WHO. The results ofthis study indicate that the United States, China, and India were the most productive countries regarding the numberof publications. Furthermore, publications from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom had the highestimpact based on the ratio of the number of citations and the number of publications. Nevertheless, when productivitywas stratified by the number of publications and the number of citations based on the gross domestic product, Iranranked first. This bibliometric approach showed that most of multidrug- and antibiotics-resistance studies focused onthe so-called critical bacteria according to the WHO but less on those bacteria catalogued as high and medium priority