Worldwide tendency and focused research in forensic anthropology: A bibliometric analysis of decade (2008-2017)

Purpose: The objective of this study was to illustrate the global research productivity and tendency of forensic anthropology in recent ten years (2008-2017) by bibliometric analysis. Methods: Forensic anthropology was used as the Medical Subject Headings term and topic in PubMed and Web of Science Core Collection. Results: As 5130 articles retrieved, two independent investigators evaluated all of them respectively. After restricting the published year, excluding duplicated and irrelevant articles, 1663 articles were available. The total of 219 countries and regions contributed to this research and the United States was the most productive country. There were 201 peer-reviewed journals including all of articles and two of them were identified as core journals according to Bradford's law. Eight of the top 10 productive authors were from developed countries. The top 10 cited articles were published by authors from developed countries with half in the United States. Sex estimation and age estimation were the most popular topics. Conclusions: With the basic and recognized methodology administered in this study, it provided a relative broad view to evaluate the scientific research capacity of forensic anthropology and reveal the worldwide tendency in this field.