75 years journey of malaria publications: what and where?

BackgroundMalaria is a life-threatening and ancient disease that has inflicted serious morbidity and mortality across the globe. The major brunt of the disease has been on African, South East Asian and South American countries. Proportionally, malaria has attracted global research priorities amongst infectious diseases and this is evident from the number of publications directly or indirectly related to malaria from across the globe, irrespective of the endemicity of the disease. However, formal and exhaustive analyses of these malaria publications are rarely done and published. MethodsWe therefore did a systematic analyses of the literature published on malaria with an intent to retrieve information on what has been published on malaria, where is it published and which countries are major contributors in malaria research. The study presents malaria publications from 1945 to 2020 retrieved using three global databases: Web of Science, Embase(R) and Scopus(R). Exported data was examined to determine the number of publications over time, their subject areas, contributions from various countries/organizations, and top publishing journals. ResultsThe total number of published records on malaria ranged from 90,282-1,12,698. On the basis of the number of publications, the United States, United Kingdom, France, and India were identified as the top four countries. Malaria Journal, American Journal of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene and PLoS One were the most preferred journals whereas the University of London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the University of Oxford appeared to be the top contributing organizations. ConclusionThe study concluded that a disproportional contribution to malaria research was observed with non-malaria endemic countries making the largest contribution. Databases were found to be incomparable and must be standardized on multiple dimensions before making a comparison. There are still some pertinent outstanding questions that need to be addressed: why there is still a research mismatch between endemic and non-endemic regions? why a standardized and comparable information is still not available for direct and quick analyses? is less case-based research conducted as compared to in-vitro or in animal models?