Contribution of Turkey in Liver Transplant Research: A Scopus Database Search

Abstract

Objectives: Liver transplantation is considered the most effective treatment modality for end-stage liver failure. The first deceased donor liver transplant in Turkey was performed by Haberal and colleagues in 1988; in 2019, a total of 1776 liver transplant procedures were performed in Turkey. While these are well-known and documented facts, the scientific output of publications on liver transplantation from Turkey is unknown. This study aimed to analyze the contribution of Turkey in liver transplant global research. Materials and Methods: Publications from Turkey on liver transplantation were analyzed using the bibliometric study method. The following research parameters were analyzed: year of publication, institutions and authors, funding, themes, sample population, and methods. We used the Scopus database to research key words containing “liver” or “hepatic” and “transplantation” in the titles, abstracts, and key words. Among duplications or multiple results, only 1 publication was included in the study. Data were analyzed by quantitative and qualitative methods. Results: We identified 45 763 publications on liver transplant. Most of the publications were in the field of medicine (93.48%). Turkey ranked fourteenth with 843 publications. The top productive affiliation was Başkent University, and the most productive author was Prof. Haberal. Conclusions: Among countries, Turkey had the most living donor liver transplants in 2019 and could serve as a model to European countries for donor shortages. Although the United States performs 5 times more liver transplants than Turkey, their publications rate was almost 22 times more. Combining a workload of performing research and publishing along with transplant surgery is together hard to master. Although Turkey has valuable experiences and has opened frontiers in transplantation, publications need to keep up with their hard work and innovations.