Bibliometric Analysis of Desflurane Research during the Period of 1991 to 2005 Min-Jia Li1,3, Yuh-Shan Ho2 and Yi-Hsin Elsa Hsu1 1Department of Health and Care Administration, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan 2Bibliometric Centre, Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan 3Department of Anesthesiology, Cathay General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan Introduction Desflurane (compound I-653) was one of the last volatile anesthetics to be synthesized in 1960s. It languished for 2 decades because of difficulties and danger in its production. It was studied thoroughly in animals and first used in humans in 1990. No analyses by bibliometric technique that have examined this topic exist in the literature. The objective of this study is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of all Desflurane-related publications in Science Citation Index (SCI). A systematic search was performed using the SCI for publications during the period of 1991 to 2005. These documents were analyzed and evaluated according to publication and to determine the quantitative characteristics of desflurane research. Methods Documents used in this study were based on the databases of the SCI which was accessed from the ISI Web of Science, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Selected documents included ‘desflurane’ and ‘I-653’ as a part of its title, abstract, or keyword. Parameters analyzed included language, type of document, page count, publication output, country of publication, and authorship. Results Table 2. Most 10 publishing countries P: Number of articles; SP: Single country; publications; CP: International collaboration publications; C: Number. of countries AU: Number of authors; J: Number of journals; IF: Impact factor; NA: No record in the JCR Figure 1. Fifteen most used author keywords Table 1. Major characteristics of the desflurane research Table 3. Publication distribution by impact factor Conclusions The results show an increasing number of articles since 1991 and author numbers, article pages, and journal numbers indicate a continuous growth of the scientific community. The US was the world leader and dominated most of the publications, followed by the Germany, UK, France, Japan, Canada and Austria. Most of the journals had impact factors, which ranged from 0 to 3, accounting for 67.7% of all papers studied. Journals with IFs of 2–3 published 616 (38.4%) papers, 441 (27.5%) were published by journals with IFs 4–6. the most frequently cited paper was ‘The Pharmacology of Sevoflurane in Infants and Children’. This article, in 1994 by Lerman, Sikich, Kleiman and Yentis, was published in Anesthesiology and was cited 161 times since its publication.