Health Tourism Research: A Scientometric Assessment of Global Publications Output during 2007-16.

The paper examines 1422 global publications on health tourism research, as covered in Scopus database during 2007-16, experiencing an annual average growth rate of 7.26% and qualitative impact averaged to 8.78 citations per paper. The top 10 most productive countries individually contributed global share from 2.91% to 22.41%, with largest global publication share coming from USA (24.12%), followed by U.K. (12.59%), Canada and Australia (7.45% and 7.10%), India and Germany (3.45% and 3.38%) etc. Together, the 10 most productive countries accounted for 70.61% share of global publication output during 2007-16. Six of top 10 countries scored relative citation index above the average (1.46): Italy (2.97), Netherlands (1.99), Germany (1.92), Canada (1.66) and France (1.59) during 2007-16. Medicine, among subjects, contributed the largest publication share (66.67%),%), followed by social sciences (20.32%), business, accounting & management (12.38%), environment science (8.65%), biochemistry, genetics & molecular biology (5.70%), nursing (5.49%), arts & humanities (4.57%) and economics, econometrics & finance (3.66%) during 2007-16. The top 15 most productive organizations and authors together contributed 17.02% and 14.77% respectively as their share of global publication output and 27.66% and 32.41% respectively as their share of global citation output during 2007-16. Among the total journal output of 1317 papers, the top 10 journals contributed 17.16% share to the global journal output during 2007-16. Of the total global health tourism research output, the top 19 highly cited publications registered citations from 82 to 178 and they together received 2224 citations, with 117.05 citations per paper. These 19 highly cited papers involved the participation of 26 authors and 27 organizations. Among leading countries contributing to high cited research, the largest number of papers (7) came from USA, followed by U.K (5 papers), Italy (4 papers), Belgium, Netherlands and Canada (3 papers each), Denmark, Australia and Germany (2 papers each), Switzerland, France, New Zealand, Spain, Iran, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Israel and Chile (1 paper each). The 19 highly cited papers involved the participation of 95 authors and 78 organizations. These 19 highly cited papers were published in 16 journals; of which of which 2 papers were published in Emerging Infectious Diseases and Human Reproduction and 1 paper each in other journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]