(ISSN: 0975-3168) . Journal of Library, Information and Vol. 6 : Issue (1-2) Communication Technology (JLICT) June, 2014 61 MAPPING OF BOVINE MASTITIS RESEARCH: A SCIENTOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF RESEARCH OUTPUT (1962-2013) G. Rathinasabapathy Deputy Librarian Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University Library Chennai – 600 051, India e-mail: grspathy@gmail.com & S. Kopperundevi Assistant Librarian, Veterinary College and Research Institute Tirunelveli – 627 001, India e-mail: devielangowins@gmail.com ABSTRACT The study analyses the bovine mastitis research output during 1962 - 2013 on different parameters including the growth, global publications share, contribution of major countries, productivity of most productive authors, most productive journals, most preferred type of publications and contribution of various subject fields. CAB Direct Online Database was used to retrieve the data for the period 1962-2013. The total number of records was 13,483 and the average number of publications per year was 280.89. The highest number of papers 437 was published in 2012. Among the top 20 most productive countries in bovine mastitis research, India ranks 1 st with 572 papers with a global publication share of 4.24% followed by USA, Brazil, UK and Germany with 413 (3.06%), 385 (2.86%), 368 (2.73% and 264 (1.96%) papers respectively. The most preferred journals were Journal of Dairy Science (with 802 papers) followed by Veterinary Record (266 papers) and Indian Veterinary Journal (219 papers). The study revealed that out of 20 high productive journals in bovine mastitis research, 4 journals are published from India with 3.56% of papers published globally. The prolific author was Arthur Saran from Kimron Veterinary Institute, Israel (with 161 papers who contributed 1.19% of global research output in bovine mastitis research. Keywords: Bovine Mastitis, Cattle disease, Scientometrics, CAB Direct, Bibliometrics, Research trends, Publication analysis, bibliographic analysis Introduction Scientometrics is the branch of science that describes the output traits in terms of organizational research structure, resource inputs and outputs and develops benchmarks to evaluate the quality of information output. Scientometrics characterizes, the disciplines using the growth pattern and other attributes. These studies have potential, particularly in assessing the emerging disciplines. In the present study, we did the scientometrics study of the research performance on Bovine Mastitis, a major livestock disease which plays a vital role in rural economy. Mastitis is the most common and the costly disease to the dairy industry. In fact, the most expensive disease on dairy farms is mastitis. Mastitis occurs throughout the world wherever dairy cows are found. The continuing presence of the disease may be attributed to deficient management, improper milking procedures, faulty milking equipment, inadequate housing, and breeding for ever-increasing milk yield. All of these factors are probably involved, although herd investigations often fail to incriminate specific factors. Because of the chronic nature of this production disease, economic damage is spread out over the year, and the economic damage of certain factors, such as milk production decreases, cannot directly be seen.