Highlights
- •This study reviews the extant literature in the domain of forensic genetics and analyzes the global research productivity.
- •Since its introduction in the late 1970 s, the importance of forensic genetics literature has significantly increased.
- •The first article in the field of forensic genetics was published in 1977.
- •Starting from 2006, there has been a considerable increase in the yearly number of publications on forensic genetics.
- •USA, China, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom were found to be the most productive countries.
Abstract
The current study aims to investigate the research publication trends in the field
of forensic genetics using Bibliometric analysis. An extensive search of the Scopus
database was conducted to identify scholarly articles on forensic genetics published
between 1977 and 2022, and a data set comprising 2945 articles was obtained. The analysis
was carried out using VOSviewer, RStudio, MS Excel and MS Access to investigate the
annual publication trend, most productive journals, organizations/authors/countries,
authorship and citation patterns, most cited documents/articles and co-occurrence
of keywords. The results revealed the first article in the field of forensic genetics
was published in 1977. By the end of 1999, only 15 articles were published. Since
then, there has been a considerable increase in the yearly number of publications
and post-2006, there were more than 100 yearly published articles. USA, China, Spain,
Germany and United Kingdom were found to be the most productive countries. Among various
organizations, the Institute of Legal Medicine, Innsbruck Medical University, Austria was found to be the most productive organization. In terms of the number of publications
and citations, Morling N. was found to be the most prolific author. The highest number of articles were published
in Forensic Science International: Genetics, contributing about 34% of the total articles published in different sources/journals.
The document with the highest number of citations was “HOMER N, 2008, PLOS GENET”, with a total of 750 citations. The most frequent keywords were forensic genetics
and forensic science, followed by STR, population genetics, DNA, mt-DNA and DNA-typing.
The results also revealed that there had been collaborative research among countries,
organizations and authors, which helps in the exchange of ideas across disciplines,
developing new skills, getting access to financial resources and generating quality
results.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: January 03, 2023
Accepted:
January 2,
2023
Received in revised form:
December 31,
2022
Received:
May 27,
2022
Identification
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