Artículos

Objective: In this study, it was aimed to determine current study topics and changing dynamics in the field of Disaster Victim Identification by conducting a bibliometric analysis of articles in the international literature. Methods: In the Web of Science database, the words “disaster victim identification”, “DVI” and “mass disaster” were searched in the titles and keywords of the publications and the articles in the literature were evaluated. The study contained 190 articles which fulfilled the criteria of being indexed in SCI-E, SSCI, or ESCI, having the research area “medicine legal”, being of document type “article”, and being in English language were included in the study. The VOSviewer 1.6.19 software was used to analyze and visualize networks. Results: The first paper was published in 1971, and the peak year for publications was 2011. Australia was the most productive country in this field with 42 publications. The articles received a total of 2,664 citations over the years, with the highest number of citations occurring in 2021. These articles were published in 15 journals, and Forensic Science International was the leading journal in this field with 55 articles. When the top 10 most cited articles were examined, it was observed that the studies covered various fields such as genetics, anthropology, radiology and odontology. Conclusion: This study is the pioneering bibliometric analysis of disaster victim identification articles. By assessing publication characteristics, international collaboration, and co-citation analysis, we’ve shed light on the latest research trends in this field. Consequently, we believe our work offers valuable insights to researchers in forensic medicine and forensic sciences.

This article addresses the question of whether personal publication lists should be used as a data source in research evaluation, or whether, as is widespread in practice, existing databases, such as Web of Science, can be used instead. For this purpose, an empirical study was carried out in which all business administration university professors (n = 233) of a non-English-speaking country, namely Austria, were ranked in several ways (e.g., full or fractional counting, consideration or non-consideration of journal rankings). All rankings were based on the number of published journal articles (n = 4246; observation period: 10 years). In one case, the personal publication lists and in the other case, the Web of Science were used as data source for these rankings. The rankings created in these two ways were compared with each other. The results show that the choice of the data source has a major influence on the ranking results. For researchers from non-English-speaking countries with (many) publications in their respective national languages, an exclusive use of international databases, such as Web of Science in our case, cannot fully consider the whole research performance. In these cases, the use of personal publication lists seems to make a lot of sense, at least for several ranking variants, despite the effort involved. The main contribution of our study is that we compare personal publication lists as a data source with Web of Science which is often used in research evaluations. In addition, this comparison is not, as usual, input-related (based on the degree of coverage in the two data sources) but impact-related (based on rankings that are created based on the publications contained in the two data sources).