Yoga Research a Scientometric Assessment of Global Publications Output during 2007-16

The paper examines 3966 global publications on yoga research, as covered in Scopus database during 2007-16. The global output on yoga research output registered 7.79% growth, and citation impact averaging to 10.44 citations per paper. The top 10 most productive countries in yoga research individually contributed global share from 1.31% to 38.35%, with largest global publication share coming from USA (38.35%), followed by India (19.29%), U.K. (6.61%), Canada (5.09%), etc. Together, the 10 most productive countries accounted for 83.74% and 96.67% global publication and global citation share during 2007-16. Five of top 10 countries scored relative citation index above the world average i.e. more than 1: Canada (1.81), USA (1.37), Germany (1.34), U.K. (1.31) and Italy (1.12) during 2007-16. The international collaborative publications share of top 10 most productive countries in yoga research varied from 12.68% to 42.59% during 2007-16. Medicine, among subjects, contributed the largest publication share (78.67%), followed by 9 other subjects with global share between 5.09% and 9.56%. The top 25 most productive organizations and authors together contributed 21.63% and 16.84% respectively as their global publication share and 35.37% and 25.10% respectively as their global citation share during 2007-16. Among the total journal output of 3719 papers, the top 15 journals contributed 21.22% share to the global journal output during 2007-16. Of the global yoga research output, the top 44 publications registered high citations from 101 to 1092 and they together cumulated 8304 citations, averaging to 188.72 citations per paper. These 44 highly cited papers were published in 35 journals, 5 papers were published in Cochrane database of systematic reviews (Online), 2 papers each in Annals of Internal Medicine, Integrative Cancer Therapies, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine and Pain and 1 paper each in other journals.