A Bibliometric Analysis of Scorpionism Epidemiology in Tropical Health

Scorpionism has driven studies around the world on data relating to epidemiological and clinical aspects in humans. From this perspective, a bibliometric review was carried out to analyze the historical and evolutionary construction of the epidemiology of scorpionism to identify the main authors, journals, countries and years of emphasis, as well as the most cited studies and most frequent terms, through quantitative and qualitative data extracted from the manuscripts. The review also investigated studies that explored the association of the topic with environmental, climatic and anthropogenic factors. The analysis was based on publications indexed in the Scopus database, covering the period from 1952 to 2022. The result of the global analysis, based on 145 articles, demonstrates a growing evolution of the topic. Brazil (17.93%) and Iran (17.24%) emerged as the most productive countries in terms of research production. However, the US, Mexico, Algeria and Canada (11.11%) have the most substantial collaborative efforts. The magazine “Toxicon” stands out as the predominant source of scientific dissemination (25%). Only eight authors have unique authorship and the author Semlali Ilham emerged as the most prominent. Universities were the affiliations with the highest productivity. The results of the metadata extraction analysis, based on a sample of 14 documents, revealed consistent and sustained epidemiological data since 1982. Of these, only one study (7.1%) from French Guiana used environmental variables to elucidate data on the occurrence of scorpion stings. The genera Tityus, Centruroides and Androctonus emerged as the most representative among the works compiled and evaluated.