Leo Sher, M.D.

A research report, “Thirty years of publications in suicidology: A bibliometric analysis” has recently been published in Archives of Suicide Research (1).

The authors performed a quantitative assessment of publications in suicidology between 1989 and 2018. Web of Science was used to identify publications on suicidal behavior from January 1, 1989 to December 31, 2018. 41,276 items were retrieved.

In 1989, 502 articles on suicidal behavior were published vs. 3,078 in 2018, corresponding to a 6.1-fold increase. The authors found that three-quarters of all publications were produced by high-income countries. Reported funding was largely public with a significant share from the private sector. According to the authors’ analyses on major psychiatric disorders, suicide research ranks 5th after research on depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, and autism. During the full 30-year period, 92.7% of all suicidology publications were published in English (88% in 1989).

Over the period 1989–2018, the USA ranked first in terms of the number of publications on suicide with 38.7% of the world production followed by the UK (10.7%) and Australia (5.9%). Scholars from Canada, Germany, Sweden, Italy, France, China, Spain, South Korea, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, India, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, Norway, and Finland have also published large numbers of papers in the field of suicidology.

The 20 most significant individual contributors to the scholarly literature on suicide in 1989-2018 were David Lester (931 suicide-related publications), J. John Mann (360), Keith Hawton (328), Maria A. Oquendo (274), Maurizio Pompili (270), Thomas E. Joiner (244), David Gunnell (235), Diego De Leo (209), Nav Kapur (197), Philippe Courtet (190), Gustavo Turecki (190), Paolo Girardi (181), Yeates Conwell (169), Danuta Wasserman (168), Leo Sher (159), Jouko Lonnqvist (153), Paul S.F. Yip (151), Matthew K. Nock (148), Alan Apter (143), and Zoltan Rihmer (141).

Reference

1. Astraud LP, Bridge JA, Jollant F. Thirty years of publications in suicidology: A bibliometric analysis. Arch Suicide Res. 2021 Oct-Dec;25(4):751-764. doi: 10.1080/13811118.2020.1746944. Epub 2020 Apr 1.