Bibliometric analysis of the Journal of Pakistan Medical Association during the period from 1965 to 2018

Objective: To conduct a bibliometric analysis of the citable documents published in the Journal of Pakistan Medical Association from 1965 to 2018. Methods: This bibliometric study of the Journal of Pakistan Medical Association was conducted using Scopus and included citable documents (original articles and review articles). The outcome parameters were number of publications, citations, top countries, authors, institutions, and citation analysis and impact factor. In addition, most frequent author keywords were presented as visualization map, using VOS viewer. The data was imported from Scopus as Microsoft Excel files and analyzed. Results: The total number of documents identified was 8,521 and 7,245 (85.03%) were included in the analysis. Articles were the most common category of the documents articles published in the journal were articles (n=6,721; 78.88%). The highest number of publications (n=441) was recorded for 2016 and citations (n=3,060) for 2017. The highest number of documents came from Pakistan (57.83%) and Aga Khan University (26%). There was a steep increase in impact factor from 0.409 to 0.718 from 2013 to 2017. The most common author keywords on the visualization map were 'Pakistan', 'diabetes', 'medical students', 'diabetes mellitus', 'prevalence'. Conclusion: There is a continuous increase in the number of publications, citations, and impact factor of the Journal of Pakistan Medical Association. In addition, the journal appears to attract wider audience, which is reflected by the analysis of its two-thousand highly cited papers.