Jointly published by AkadØmiai Kiad, Budapest Scientometrics, and Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht Vol. 60, No. 2 (2004) 205215 Received February 9, 2004 Address for correspondence: YUH-SHAN HO School of Public Health, Taipei Medical University 250 Wu-Hsing Street, Taipei 11014, Taiwan E-mail: ysho@tmu.edu.tw 01389130/2004/US $ 20.00 Copyright ' 2004 AkadØmiai Kiad, Budapest All rights reserved Bibliometric analysis of Patent Ductus Arteriosus treatments WANG-HUU HSIEH, a WEN-TA CHIU, a YEE-SHUAN LEE, a YUH-SHAN HO b a Taipei Medical University -Wan-Fang Hospital, Taipei (Taiwan) b School of Public Health, Taipei Medical University, Taipei (Taiwan) A bibliometric analysis was performed to assess the quantitative trend of Patent Ductus Arteriosus (PDA) treatment research, including intravenous injection of indomethacin and surgery. The documents studied were retrieved from the Science Citation Index (SCI) for the period from 1991 to 2002. The publication pattern concerning authorship, collaboration, original countries, citation frequency, document type, language of publication, distribution of journals, page count and the most frequently cited papers were performed. The results indicated that either treatment was not the recent emphasis of PDA research. The publishing countries of both treatments have also denoted that these researches were mostly done in Europe and North America. Both surgery and drug treatments had few international collaboration papers. English was the dominant language, and collaboration of two to six authors was the most popular level of co-authorship. Introduction The ductus arteriosus, connecting the main pulmonary arteries and the aortic arch, always closed within 2 days of birth (RUDOLPH et al., 1961). If the ductus remains open, then it is called Patent Ductus Arteriosus (PDA). PDA occurs around 5% to 10% in all congenital heart disease where the male to female ratio is 1 to 3 (MITCHELL et al., 1971). Treatments of PDA can be conducted in two ways: intravenous injection of indomethacin or ibuprofen and surgery of coil embolization or surgical ligation. The most effective treatment for premature PDA infants is intravenous injection of indomethacin. However, the drug treatment does not work for infants older than 1 month. The coil embolization of surgery treatment can only be applied when smaller PDA size occurred (PATEL et al., 1999). The surgical ligation is limited to patients that reach the weight limit, otherwise it would lead to branchiolitis or pheumothorax. Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative analysis done to aid the evaluation of research performances (VAN DEN BERGHE, 1998). Recent increasing use of bibliometric analysis of institutes (JEEVAN & GUPTA, 2002), journals (SCHUBERT, 1996), grants and many