Journal of Epidemiology and Public Health

A Bibliometric Analysis Of Sick Building Syndrome Research

Abstract

Upama Ghimire, Taha Hussein Musa and Zhang Juan

Introduction: Sick-building syndrome (SBS) is a common but neglectedhealth issue in the world. Thus the study was to assess and analyze theanuualscientific output of SBS and evaluate the pertinent publication from the past decades.

Methods: A comprehensive list of citation classics in SBS was generated by searching the Scopus databases using keywords; Title (sick and building and syndrome) title (building and syndrome) during the period 1975 to march 2020. The main bibliometric indicators including, year of publications, country of origin, initiations, article type, productive journals, prolific authors, and funding sources.A statistical software package called R (Biblioshiny) and VOSviewer were used for data analysis and visualization.

Results: A total of 587 documents were retrieved from Scopus , with an average of 18.63 citations per documents, an average of 2.3 authors per documents. The United States was a leading country with the highest research documents(114), followed by Sweden (62) and United Kingdom(50). Geographical distribution of publications showed Asiancountries such as Japan(34),China(28), Malaysia(17) are the most active one among others. Chiba and Uppsala University (n =15) were the most active institution. The top-cited documents focused on the impact of SBSoutcome and its related symptoms.

Conclusions: The annual number of publications are slowly increasing fromthe past decades. There are not many Asian countries involved in SBS research, and very few numbers of paper are published in journal with good impact factor.Thus , this study highlights that a growing of documents in SBS research collaboration in this field needs to be strengthened to improve the global attention to SBS issue and others SBS factors need to be addressed

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