Cardiovascular disease: The Brazilian research contribution

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death around the world. According to a study from the World Economic Forum, the economic burden of this disease to society reached US$ 863 billion in 2010, with an estimation to rise by 22% to US$ 1,044 in 2030[1]. Likewise, recent studies have shown that in Brazil ischemic heart disease and stroke have been the main cause of death since the end of the 1960s, costing a total of R$ 56.2 billion just in 2015[2,3]. Due to Brazil’s large size, its 27 states have developed unevenly, so states located in the south and southeast regions of the country are more developed and have the best infrastructure[2]. Hence, such differences ought to be considered when allocating resources efficiently to improve healthcare among the population. It is imperative to seek knowledge through locally-based research as its outcomes may be used as a tool to instruct policy makers, regional-level physicians, health professionals and the general population[4]. To establish the Brazilian contribution to cardiovascular disease research, the Scival platform (www.scival.com) was used, which analyzes data from several sources such as Scopus and ScienceDirect. In the case of patent article citations, data emanate from European Patent Office, Intellectual Property Office, Japan Patent Office, United States Patent and Trademark Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization. A query was made to retrieve data from Brazil which had been published within the most recent 5-year period (2014-2018) in the field of “Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine”. One of the key features of Scival is that it disaggregates each field into specific research topics. As approximately 96,000 specific research topics have been defined, topic clusters are formed by aggregating topics with similar research interest, creating a broader area of research[5]. It is important to note that a publication can belong to only one topic, consequently, to one topic cluster. The indicators used for this analysis were the following: • Scholarly output: The number of documents published within the 5-year period in the topic cluster. • Growth (%): This indicator represents the increase or decrease of published documents within the specific topic cluster in the 5-year period. • International collaboration (%): The proportion of published documents authored by researchers from Brazil and another countries. • Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI): Indicator that refers to citations received in the year of publication plus the following 3 years. FWCI of 1.00 means that the publications have been cited at world average for similar publications. Thus, a score of 1.17 indicates that the outputs have been cited 17% more than expected. Contrarily, a FWCI of 0.77 means 23% less cited than the world average. • Patent-cited scholarly output: The count of scholarly outputs published by the country that have been cited in patents.