Road Traffic Accident Research in India: A Scientometric Study from 1977 to 2020

This study carried out the scientometric analysis of road traffic accident research in India from 1977 to 2020. It aimed to examine type of publications with their citations and usage, the year wise publication and citation growth, most preferred journals, authors’ preference of keywords used, collaboration of Indian authors, authorship pattern and most prolific authors, and top contributing organizations. During 44 years of study, 1,132 research items were published and indexed in Web of Science (WoS) bibliographic database. Analysis discovered that number of publications increased from one (0.08%) in 1977 to 182 (16.07%) in 2018 and observed good progress in scholarly literature. Majority of scholarly publications were published in the form of article (740, 65.37%). From 2006 to 2018, number of publications increased rapidly from 11 (0.97%) to 182 (16.07%) publications, which was the most productive year for the researchers. On an average 25.73 documents were published per year and received 392.95 citations per year. Journal of Evaluation of Medical and Dental Sciences published majority of the publications (108, 30.50%). The word “Trauma” was the most frequently used keyword. Majority of publications (83.38%) on road traffic accidents (RTA) were written by the Indian authors individually or with local collaboration. Majority of the publications (1,081, 95.49%) were written by multiple authors while 51 publications (4.51%) were from single author. Most prolific authors were Tiwari, G. and Mohan, D. with 18 publications each. The Indian Institute of Technology was highly contributing organization, which published 120 documents (10.60%).