Bibliometric analysis on global Parkinson's disease research trends during 1991-2006.

In 10 years, we will mark the 200th anniversary of the James Parkinson's original description of the disease that now bears his name. This study was to explore an alternative statistical approach to quantitatively and qualitatively assessing current research trends on global Parkinson's disease, using the related literatures from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science databases during the period of 1991-2006. Articles were concentrated on the analysis by scientific output characters, world collaboration, and the frequency of author keywords used. An exponential regression was applied to model the high correlation between cumulative number of articles and the year. International collaborative articles were more prevalent in recent years than earlier years, and increasing international collaboration would lead to more powerful articles due to the sharing of ideas and workloads, while China, Italy, Spain, and Austria are benefit a lot from the international cooperation. Finally, author keywords were analyzed contrastively, with research trends and recent hotspots provided.