Scientific Productivity in the Field of Patient Rights in Thomson Reuters Citation Database: A Glance at Iran's Share inInternational Researches

The issues of patient rights have recently been entered into medical and legal realms and have attracted theattention of scholars. This field, which is in early stages of development, requires studying the patterns and characteristics of its scientific production and its compatibility with the global norms of the worlds’ sciences.The present study aimed to investigate the scientific productivity and its impact patterns on patient rights during 1990-2010. Hence, it endeavors to discover their growth trend, local and global impact, the most productive contributing countries, authors and journals, document types, dominant languages, highly cited authors, and finally Iran's share.It may help to reflect the progress of knowledge and its patterns and alsohighlight the weaknesses and strengths, and thereby be useful in managing and planning research and development in this field. The present study applied a survey method with a scientometrics approach. All the scientific productions indexed by the Thomson Reuters database during 1990-2010 constituted the study materials. A total number of 1236 records were extracted.The data were analyzed through Excel and Thomson Reuters HistCite software, using descriptive and analytical statistics including frequency, percentage, Spearman correlation, and linear, power and exponential regressions analysis. The maximum scientific output production in this field has been published during 2006-2010. They showedan increasing trend on an exponential basis, illustrating the sustainability of scientific production in this field. However, the citation number did not show a significant growth. This could be resulted from the small size of this field andits related domains. The total globalimpact was lower than the total local impact implying that the papers were rather an inspiration source for other related fields than an intra-field source. Authorship pattern adhered to Lotka's law in that the number of authors decreased as their publications increase on a power basis. However, the exponent equation is higher than two. The global distribution of the papers and their language variations signified the world's concerns for patient rights. The patient rights exhibits many similarities to scientific fields and its publication foundation is being established and stabilized: the exponential growth of the papers, their language and document variation, global distribution, and specially its research nature indicated the development of this field as a research realm.