{"doi":"10.31219/osf.io/jeuar","title":"The relationship between publication volume of biomedical research and burden of disease","abstract":"<p>Background One could hypothesize that the biomedical research agenda aligns with the (global) burden of disease, since it should aim to reduce illness and death. We investigated the relationship between publication volume and Research-dependent Fraction of Global Burden of Disease (BoD-RdF): the fraction of Burden of Disease that can only be relieved by further biomedical research. Aim of this comparison is to evaluate and support the optimization of biomedical research portfolios.MethodsBoD-RdF, defined as the burden of disease reported in the 1st quartile of the age corrected burden of disease per capita for all countries, was calculated using 2014 Global Burden of Disease data from WHO for the years 2000 and 2012. Publication volumes were based on 6.5 million publications between 2000 and 2012 from the Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science database, categorized into disease groups by keyword analysis and text mining techniques. The categorized publication volumes were compared to BoD-RdF. FindingsFrom the global burden of disease in 2012, we estimate that 48% depends on further biomedical research to be relieved (BoD-RdF). Generally, diseases with high burden are underresearched, whereas diseases with relatively little burden are overrepresented in the global research portfolio. Large variations in publication volume (up to twelve-fold) exist for diseases with similar BoD-RdF. Likewise, diseases with a similar publication volume vary greatly in BoD-RdF (up to 50-fold). Compared to 2000, the disease-specific publication volume almost doubled in 2012, but the correlation with burden of disease and BoD-RdF showed only a small improvement.InterpretationWe found a profound and persistent misalignment of publication volume with BoD-RdF. For 18 diseases, which account for 50% of the global BoD-RdF, a factor 2 increase of the publication volume would be justified based on BoD-RdF. This misalignment persisted over the last decade, despite doubling of the total number of disease specific publications. Although we recognize that the global research portfolio will never be dictated by global disease burden alone, we propose that the comparison between BoD-RdF and publication volume provides supportive insights that can be used in optimization of the research portfolio.</p>","journal":"Leiden Repository (Leiden University)","year":2019,"id":4921,"datarank":0.5958201073519062,"base_score":2.1972245773362196,"endowment":2.1972245773362196,"self_citation_contribution":0.32958368660043297,"citation_network_contribution":0.2662364207514732,"self_endowment_contribution":0.32958368660043297,"citer_contribution":0.2662364207514732,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":8,"citer_count":8,"citers_with_citation_signal":7,"citers_with_endowment":7,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.0449,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2019-08-29","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":50837,"name":"Thijs de Kruif","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":50838,"name":"Lissy van de Laar","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":236,"name":"Ludo Waltman","orcid":"0000-0001-8249-1752","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":50839,"name":"Ingeborg Meijer","orcid":"0000-0003-1481-1739","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":50840,"name":"Marcel Levi","orcid":"0000-0002-2212-5299","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":50841,"name":"Anshu Gupta","orcid":"0000-0003-2284-6050","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":50836,"name":"Niels Hagenaars","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":13,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-03-01T18:20:47.508186Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}