Drug Safety scientometrics overview highlights public health issues.
Résumé
Drug Safety (DS) or Pharmacovigilance, is the science of monitoring adverse effects of pharmaceutical. While DS is a major issue in public health, we reported for the first time a landscape analysis of the literature. A corpus of 1,3350,138 documents was analysed through bibliometric statistics and VOSviewer network visualisation tool. The study was completed by RPYS analysis and the identification of delayed recognition (DR) publications by calculating the Beauty coefficient. DS reveals some characteristics: (1) research increase recently while major drug regulation backed to 1960’ (2) it is a heterogenous and evolutive research field (3) most of publications are published outside core journals (2) the contribution of the industry is marginal raising questions about the industry responsibilities (4) there is strong correlation between country publications output and population size, but not pharmaceuticals expenses (5) US federal institutions are lagging behind in reporting DS (6) anti-cox2 ADR controversy has awakened DS research field (7) identification of DR papers raise questions about resistance to the discovery of ADR and public health impact. Further studies are in need to measure if DR papers are linked to delayed drug withdrawn. Our overall analysis is supporting the prospective for literature-based discovery in Drug Safety.