Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a complex condition with multi-systemic implications that can greatly impact patients’ lives. To understand and deliver the varied needs of people with PCOS, a substantial onus lies on PCOS researchers to objectively study patient data and formulate evidence-based recommendations. Equitable research is crucial to ensure fair representation of people of various ethnicities and stratify population-specific analysis to have generalisable findings in policy papers and scientific research globally. The aim of this study is to quantify and study the variation and collaboration across geography in top 2500 most-cited PCOS peer-reviewed articles.

Methods: We screened all publications for the search query “Polycystic Ovary Syndrome” in the title or abstract to extract the top 2500 publications with the highest number of total citations using the software Dimensions^®. We identified the authors and organisation/ hospital of practice of authors through their listed affiliations. Countries of practice were further classified into high-income, lower-middle income, upper-middle income, or low-income countries(LIC) based on the 2022 World bank report. Vos Viewer^® was used to analyse bibliometrics and analyse total link strength between various categories. Network visualisation was done to analyse co-authorship between researchers’ countries of practice. Similarly, overlay visualisation was used to study collaborations over time. Mann Whitney U-test was done to study the total link strength in co-authorships in HICs and LMICs with P< 0.05 considered as statistically significant.

Results: The authors of the top 2500 of 28 901 most cited articles for PCOS with 396 040 citations(59.5% of the total citations) were from 62 countries(40 HICs, 15 UMICs, and 7 LMICs). The United States had the highest number of total publications(847) and citations(155 590) followed by UK(324 publications with 54 451) and Australia(186 publications with 37 042). Only 3/54 African countries and no low-income countries were identified as the researchers’ country of practice. For PCOS research, HICs had higher link strength than LMICs(P=0.007). We found only 3 clusters with a total 448 links between countries in the network visualisation with a total link strength of 1310. In overlay visualisation, collaborations during the last decade were noticed between some HICs and MICs including Lebanon, Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, and China.

Conclusion: Our study shows the limited global representation of MICs and LICs in the most impactful PCOS research by total citations. This highlights the need for more extensive partnerships and networks, particularly with researchers from LMICs to increase the representation of PCOS research globally.