Bibliometric Analysis of Drinking Water-Related Research Pei-Yu Lin1#, Yu-Ting Feng1, Wen-Ta Chiu2,3 and Yuh-Shan Ho4* 1School of Public Health, Taipei Medical University 2Graduate Institute of Injury Prevention and Control, Taipei Medical University 3Department of Neurosurgery, Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital 4Bibliometric Centre, Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital Introduction In 1845 Dr. John Snow of London proved a definite relationship between drinking water and cholera. Today, water treatment and specifically chlorination and/or filtration of drinking water has been haled as the major public health achievement of the 20th century. Our purpose was to study the drinking water-related performance based on 20,365 documents published in Science Citation Index (SCI)-indexed periodicals between 1991 and 2005. These documents were analyzed and evaluated according to publication distribution and were used to determine the quantitative characteristics of the research. Table 1. Major characteristics of the research Methods Documents used in this study were based on the databases of the SCI which was accessed from the ISI Web of Science, ‘Drink* Water*’, were used as keywords to search titles, abstracts, and keywords. Parameters analyzed included type of document, page count, authorship, journal, author keywords and country of publication. Results There was logarithmic relation between yearly cumulative number of publications and the year from 1991 to 2005. Figure 1. Cumulative number of publications by year Table 2. Publication activity of top ten countries Figure 2. Ten most used author keywords Of the 18,555 articles in SCI, 12,304 articles had author keyword information. Among 24,601 keywords, 17,085 (69%) keywords were used only 1 time. PY: Publication P : No. of articles PG: Total pages AU: No. of authors J : No. of journals NR: Cited reference count SP: Single country publications CP: International collaborative publications Conclusions The logarithmic relation shows that drinking water research was a constant growth rate on publications in the fifty year. Thirteen document types were found in the total of 20,365 documents. Ninety-one percent of all documents are articles. The seven industrial countries (U.S.A, Japan, Germany, Canada, U.K, France, and Spain) represent a share of corresponding authors of 60% of world articles.