A bibliometric analysis of lab-on-a-chip research from 2001 to 2013

The miniaturized analytical device or ‘lab-on-a-chip’ (LOC) has been the subject of increasing interest over the past two decades, especially in the fields of chemical analysis and biological analysis, which has resulted in an increase in the quality and number of published papers related to this topic. In this paper, the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index databases from the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science were searched to identify the LOC-related works published from 2001 to 2013. In total, 3746 documents were found during this period. All collated documents were analysed based on the following parameters: publication year, document type, language, country, institution, author, journal, research area, number of citations, and international collaboration. The majority of works published on LOC included ‘article’ and ‘review’ document types. The Lab on a Chip journal published the largest number of papers on this topic. The majority of LOC research was published in the English language and originated from the USA. University of California System was the most productive institution and ‘Chemistry’ was the most popular research area. According to the citation count of publications, the top 10 most-cited articles and the top 10 most-cited review papers were identified and the characteristics of these papers were described.