Introduction: Investigating the developments in the ever-growing field of disaster medicine and revealing the scientific trends will make an important contribution to researchers in related fields. This study aims to identify the contributions of emergency medicine physicians (EMPs) and trends in disaster medicine publications.
Methods: The expressions "disaster medicine" or "disaster*" and "medicine*" were searched in the Web of Science (WoS) database. Research and review papers produced by EMPs from 2001 through 2021 were included in the study. Basic descriptive information was assessed such as the number of publications, authors, citations, most active authors, institutions, countries, and journals. In addition, conceptual, intellectual, and social structures were analyzed.
Results: The study included a total of 346 papers written by 1,500 authors. The mean citation rate per publication was 13.2. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, and Academic Emergency Medicine were the journals with the highest number of publications and the highest number of citations. The most common keywords used by the authors were "disaster medicine," "emergency medicine," and "disaster/disasters." According to the distribution of the corresponding authors by country, the United States (n = 175), Japan (n = 23), Italy (n = 20), Australia (n = 17), and Canada (n = 17) had the highest number of publications. The institutions that produced the most publications were John Hopkins University (n = 37), Brigham and Women's Hospital (n = 27), George Washington University (n = 25), University Piemonte Orientale (n = 24), and Brown University (n = 22).
Conclusion: Increasingly, EMPs have contributed to disaster medicine publications over the years. This study can be used as a guide for EMPs and other researchers who want to contribute to the disaster medicine literature.
Keywords: bibliometric analysis; disaster medicine; emergency medicine; scientific productivity.