A bibliographic study about equine research

Abstract

In order to map the international landscape of equine research, a bibliometric study has been performed on the relevant literature published between 1998 and 2000. Data have been extracted both from the CAB abstracts from CAB International database and the Current Contents database from the Institute for Scientific Information. After unification of the two datasets, 6775 notices related to horses have been issued from scientific journals (64%), transfer publications (31%) or conference proceedings (6%). The topics of research interest have been indentified by an automatic clustering of the key-words. Pathology, locomotion-training, reproduction, nutrition, genetics, social sciences represent 56%, 17%, 11%, 5%, 4% and 4% of notices respectively. Behaviour, feral-donkeys species and doping represent 1% of notices each. A publication has been assigned to the countries of the contributing institutions. USA and EU represent the main producers with 40 and 36% of scientific articles. Besides the USA, the main producers of scientific articles are the United Kingdom (12.5%), Germany (6.3%), Japan (4.3%), Canada (3.8%), Australia (3.8%) and France (3.4%). However on the all production, France comes at the 4^th rank because of the national oriented litterature. France is mainly involved in reproduction, social sciences and doping, so on the contrary, pathology and behaviour are less studied in France than in others countries. «Ile de France» area accounts for 33.5% of french notices. The other important french areas for equine research are the Centre, Rhône-Alpes, Pays de Loire, Midi-Pyrénées and Basse-Normandie regions. No french town appears among the 25 leading towns because of the geographic spreading of equine research teams all over the country.