Describing and mapping scientific articles on alcohol globally for the period 2010-2021: a bibliometric analysis

Objectives: To describe and map scientific literature related to alcohol consumption, its determinants, governance, harm and control policies by publication output, author affiliations, funding, countries of study and research themes.

Design: Bibliometric analysis using performance analysis and science mapping techniques.

Data sources: Scientific articles.

Eligibility criteria: Indexed scientific articles published between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2021 with an English abstract focused on alcohol consumption, its determinants, harms, governance and control policies.

Data extraction and synthesis: Searches were run in Web of Science and PubMed. Performance metrics were analysed using descriptive statistics. Keywords were used for science mapping in a deductive approach to cluster articles by five main research themes. The 'policy response' theme was further analysed by six subthemes.

Results: 4553 articles were included in the analysis. Three out of four articles (3479/4553, 76.4%) were authored solely by authors affiliated with HIC institutions. One in five articles (906/4553, 19.9%) had at least one author affiliated to an institution from an upper-middle-income, middle-income or low-income country context. Governments, followed by research institutions, were the predominant funding source. Half (53.1%) studied a single country and, of these, 77.0% were high-income countries (HICs). Australia, USA and UK were the most studied countries, together accounting for 44.9% (975/2172) of country-specific articles. Thematically, 'consumption' was most studied, and 'alcohol determinants', least. 'Policy response' articles were predominately conducted in HIC contexts.

Conclusions: Although the attributable harm of alcohol is known to affect more significantly lower-income and middle-income countries, scientific publications primarily report on HIC contexts by authors from HICs. Research themes reflect known cost-effective policy actions, though skewed towards HICs and a focus on consumption. The implementation of context-specific alcohol control policies requires addressing the determinants of the uneven geographical and thematic distribution of research.