3.4 Publication distribution by country and collaborations among
countries
Scientific production at the global level is presented in Figure 4,
where it becomes evident that industrialized countries were the most
productive countries in terms of research outputs. A total of 50
countries published research in AMR in wildlife over the last 40 years.
Of these, five countries contributed to approximately 72% of research
publications total. The leadership of the United States, as well as the
concentration of research in European countries, especially Spain,
Portugal, United Kingdom and Sweden, stand out. In addition, Czech
Republic and Italy in Europe, are prominent, as well as Canada and
Australia. These results are not surprising and the dominance of these
countries is probably related to their economic development and
substantial amount of financial support to researchers, which has
already been linked to overall academic output (Peng et al., 2019). The
dominance of Portugal, Spain and Sweden is likely related to some
prolific authors developing their interest. Figure 4 show regions that
are poorly surveyed and where intensified sampling efforts could be most
valuable, namely Asia, Africa and South America. A special focus has to
be devoted to these countries as human populations are growing and
landscapes are being transformed rapidly. Klein et al. (2018) showed
that overall antibiotic consumption between 2000 and 2015 has increased
by 65%, and in developing countries it has been meeting, or even
exceeding, the levels observed in developed countries. Additionally, Van
Boeckel et al. (2019) mapped resistance in livestock, showing that the
largest hotspots of AMR in these animals are in China and India, with
emerging countries such as Brazil and Kenya, all countries where
research in AMR in wildlife has been residual or absent. The increase in
meat production and demand, and the shift in livestock production
systems in developing countries, stresses the importance to implement
actions to prevent further aggravation of the AMR problem. This can be
done by increasing collaborative research within this topic with
countries where the laboratory and analytical infrastructures are
already implemented but also by increased funding availability to
increased infrastructures and qualified researchers in these countries,
which will obviously translate into an increase in publications.
Interestingly, U.S.A. was also the country with a higher number of
citations (total citations 1211), however it was the Czech Republic
which scored the highest in the average article citation (39) (Table 2).
It is important to stress that the number of citations is not a
straightforward indicator of a paper quality but rather a measure of its
impact among peers and/or visibility.
Two countries stand out with intense cooperation among themselves:
Portugal and Spain in the Iberian Peninsula. This region has several
scientific and technological activities which aim to intensify and
consolidate strong scientific collaboration, apart from the cultural and
language link (Knobel et al., 2013). Additionally, among the top 5 of
the most productive authors, four are from the Iberian Peninsula (Table
2). Consistent with observations in other research fields, a small group
of prolific authors contributed to a significant share of publications.
For example, the top 5 authors, produced 41% of the total publications.
Considering the number of publications the most productive authors in
AMR research in wildlife were P. Poeta with 22 publications (10%),
followed by C. Torres with 20 papers (9%), G. Igrejas 18 (8%), B.
Olsen with 14 (7%), and A. Gonçalves with 13 (6%).
Spain, Germany, Sweden and France maintained active collaborations
(Figure 4). The overview of publications that include international
collaboration is a good indicator that research in this topic is
becoming more internationally connected, a fact that can be observed in
the map of global collaboration. Furthermore, international
collaboration also demonstrates the importance of large collaborative
networks to tackle AMR in wildlife, where ecological factors
(e.g. , migratory behavior) contribute to the dissemination of
resistance genes (Wellington et al., 2013). Overall, such information is
valuable to discover new places where new work should start or where to
build up some collaborations.