Research carried out in France on infectious diseases affecting livestock animals: temporal trend and comparison with international

Abstract

A bibliometric database based on the Web of Science Core collection® includes scientific papers published between 2006 and 2013 on infectious and zoonotic diseases affecting livestock animals, including fish and bees ; only international journals and papers written in English were considered. The French scientific production reached around 400 papers per year represented 4.3% of the international scientific production. The main author was from a French reserach team for 60% of the parpers and the number of publications shows a 3% annual increase rate, to be compared to the international rate of 5%. Forty-four percent of the papers dealt with ruminants, 20% poultry, 11 % fish, 10% pigs, 5% rabbits, 4% horses, 1% bees and the others were multipecies. The number of papers decreased progressively for rabbits and horse, whereas it increased for poultry, fish, pigs and bees, 44 % of the papers concerned viruses, 31% bacteria, 22% parasites, 5% prions. These distributions as well as the families of pathogens studied were quite similar to what is observed worldwide, with small differences. An international collaboration was observed for 62% of the papers, and this percentage increased progressively. The main partner countries were the neighbourhood countries of France as well as the United States and to a lesser extent Canada, China and South Africa.