Developing Drug Literatures. 1. Bibliometrics of Baclofen and Dantrolene Sodium

Abstract

The literatures of two antispastic drugs, baclofen and dantrolene sodium, were studied bibliometrically for their first decade and were found to be generally similar. Baclofen had 93 papers and dantrolene sodium had 70. About a quarter of the baclofen papers were in a foreign language, whereas almost all dantrolene sodium papers were in English. Baclofen literature had a lower nonscholarly content, but the scholarly increase, 5%, was the same for both. Both drugs had an average of 12 references per paper. The literatures of both drugs had a similar degree of internal cohesiveness; almost half of their papers referred to other papers in the same drug collection. The first human paper for baclofen was the second published; for dantrolene sodium, it was the eleventh. The distribution of journals carrying papers on each of these drugs followed Bradford's law. Two authors per paper was the average for each drug. The productivity of authors approximated Lotka's law for both drugs. About two-thirds of the papers of both drugs had a drug-word in their titles. The literature of both drugs contained about 15% legendary papers, typical of clinical pharmacology. The most intense papers, 15 for baclofen and 11 for dantrolene sodium, were identified, using citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-citation frequencies. A generalization predicts what might be expected from the literature of future antispastic drugs.

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