Bibliometric analysis on human health impairment induced by pesticide exposure

Human health impairment induced by pesticide exposure has become a hot research topic. In this study, a bibliometric analysis on 481 English articles indexed by Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) in Web of Science, and 46 Chinese articles indexed by China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) has been conducted. Generally, the number of articles about the health impairment induced by pesticide exposure is increasing, and the developed countries represented by the United States of America play a dominant role in this research field. The case-control study, the cohort study and the cross-sectional study are the three major research types, and Logistic regression and linear regression are the two most commonly adopted quantitative research methods. The impairment effect induced by pesticide exposure on all the human body systems, especially the nerve system, the reproductive system, and the circulatory system are the major research areas, which have also become the hot research issues during the period of 2011 to 2015. Substantial articles have also analyzed the correlations between pesticide exposure and the human cancer as well as death. It is noteworthy that there is a large gap between China and the developed countries in terms of the research performance in the field of the health impairment induced by pesticide exposure.