JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Skin cancers are due to the development of abnormal cells that can invade or spread to other parts of the body. White people in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa have the highest rates of melanoma in the world. Which countries’ authors contributed most articles on scan cancer to the academics is still unknown.

Objective:

To apply an author-weighted scheme(AWS) to quantify the credits for coauthors on an article byline, we transformed authors’ weights to the country-level credits in articles.

Methods:

We obtained 16,804 abstracts published since 1938 on July 20, 2019, based on a keyword search of “skin cancer” in PubMed Central(PMC). The author names, countries/areas, and journals were recorded. The international author collaborations on skin cancer were analyzed based on country-level credits in articles. We disclosed the following features: (1) country distribution for the 1st authors and the most popular journals; (2) choropleth maps were put on dashboards to highlight the most influential countries in publications and journal impact factors(JIF) using the bibliometric x-index and AWS to display; (3) scatter plots using Kano model were used to characterize the types of the country-level research achievements toward the JIF, the productive, or the neutral. We programed Microsoft Excel VBA routines to extract data from PMC. Google Maps were applied to display graphical representations.

Results:

We observed that (1) the most number of papers based on the 1st authors are from the United States (5103, 30 %), Germany (1234, 7.34 %), and Australia (997, 5.93 %);(2)the most popular journal with the highly frequent publications is J Am Acad Dermatol(538,3.19%) in the past; (3) the top three influential countries are similar to productive results. The correlation coefficient is 0.86 between the two indices based on the x-indexes(Figure 2) and the 1st author basis(Table 1) around the 116 countries/areas; (4) the top three are toward the productive, the JIF, and the neutral, respectively, using the Kano model to classify.

Conclusions:

Scatter plots based on the Kano model, x-index, and the JIF are demonstrated to provide broad and deep insight into the county-level research achievements on skin cancer. The research approaches of this study have the potential to be applied to other disciplines, not just skin cancer.