The Australian contribution to the literature on atypical antipsychotic drugs: a bibliometric study

Objective: We performed a bibliometric study on scientific publications on atypical antipsychotic drugs (AADs) from Australia. Methods: Using the EMBASE and MEDLINE databases, we chose those documents produced in Australia between 1993 and 2011, whose title included the descriptors atypic* (atypical*), antipsychotic*, second-generation antipsychotic*, clozapine, risperidone, olanzapine, ziprasidone, quetiapine, sertindole, aripiprazole, paliperidone, amisulpride, zotepine, asenapine, iloperidone, lurasidone, perospirone and blonanserin. We applied bibliometric indicators of production as well as dispersion. Results: We identified 438 relevant publications. The most widely studied AADs were clozapine (162 documents), olanzapine (103), risperidone (77) and quetiapine (42). There was a lack of exponential growth in publications over time, indicated by non-fulfilment of Price's Law (correlation coefficient r=0.9195 after exponential adjustment vs. r=0.9253 after linear adjustment). Publications appeared in 148 different journals, with four of the top nine journals having an impact factor greater than 3; 84 of the articles appeared in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. Conclusion: Despite Australian publications on AADs appearing in reasonably high impact journals, most were confined to a single Australian psychiatry journal and overall publications did not show exponential growth over the period studied. This might reflect, inter alia, the relative paucity of medication trials being performed in Australia.