Worldwide tendency and focused research in forensic anthropology: A bibliometric analysis of decade (2008–2017)

Legal Medicine 37 (2019) 67–75

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Worldwide tendency and focused research in forensic anthropology: A bibliometric analysis of decade (2008–2017) Gang Leia, Fei Liua,b, Peng Liua, Yuan Zhouc, Tong Jiaod, Yong-Hui Danga,e,f,g,

T

⁎

a

College of Medicine & Forensics, Xi’an Jiaotong University Health Science Center, Xi’an, Shaanxi, PR China Clinical Research Center of Shaanxi Province for Dental and Maxillofacial Diseases, Colleage of Stomatology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, PR China c College of Public Health, Xi’an Jiaotong University Health Science Center, Xi’an, Shaanxi, PR China d Zonglian College of Xi’an Jiaotong University, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, PR China e Key Laboratory of the Health Ministry for Forensic Medicine, Xi'an Jiaotong University Health Science Center, Xi’an, Shaanxi, PR China f Key Laboratory of Shaanxi Province for Forensic Medicine, Xi’an Jiaotong University Health Science Center, Xi’an, Shaanxi, PR China g State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi’an, Shaanxi, PR China b

A R T I C LE I N FO

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Forensic anthropology Forensic science Bibliometrics Research trend

Purpose: The objective of this study was to illustrate the global research productivity and tendency of forensic anthropology in recent ten years (2008–2017) by bibliometric analysis. Methods: “Forensic anthropology” was used as the Medical Subject Headings term and topic in PubMed and Web of Science Core Collection. Results: As 5130 articles retrieved, two independent investigators evaluated all of them respectively. After restricting the published year, excluding duplicated and irrelevant articles, 1663 articles were available. The total of 219 countries and regions contributed to this research and the United States was the most productive country. There were 201 peer-reviewed journals including all of articles and two of them were identified as core journals according to Bradford’s law. Eight of the top 10 productive authors were from developed countries. The top 10 cited articles were published by authors from developed countries with half in the United States. Sex estimation and age estimation were the most popular topics. Conclusions: With the basic and recognized methodology administered in this study, it provided a relative broad view to evaluate the scientific research capacity of forensic anthropology and reveal the worldwide tendency in this field.

1. Introduction Forensic anthropology is an innovative and active research field, which is considered as a branch of physical anthropology and forensic science [1,2]. It is a traditional discipline that helps medical examiners, police, lawyers and judicial officials to understand the significance of bone evidence in criminal investigation, case litigation, trial work and civil cases. This special field includes the gathering and examination of bone and skeletal fragments evidence, ranging from personal identification, identification of historical personalities and investigation of historical mass graves, to the estimation of species, race, age, gender, stature and the reconstruction of face based on medical imaging technology of skeleton, skeletal characteristics examination and DNA extraction from bones [3–12]. Forensic anthropology has a long research history for more than 40 years [2,3,13]. With the development of forensic anthropology,

⁎

forensic odontology and forensic radiology were set up as two independent disciplines respectively. But they are still the momentous areas focused by forensic anthropologists. In 2013, Emanuela Gualdi-Russo has published a bibliometric analysis on forensic anthropology, in which they analyzed the trend of the discipline from 2000 to 2009 within PubMed Central database. However, articles from only one specific forensic journal (Forensic Science International) was chosen to analyze in their study [2]. Consequently, the purpose of the current study was to provide the worldwide tendency and focus of forensic anthropology during the recent 10 years (2008–2017) by bibliometric analysis with using the databases of Web of Science Core Collection and PubMed. These databases were selected for its professional standards, international visibility, broad coverage and the availably controlled vocabulary thesaurus for indexing and retrieving documents [14–16].

Corresponding author at: College of Medicine & Forensics, Xi’an Jiaotong University Health Science Center, Yanta Road W.76, Xi’an, Shaanxi 710061, PR China. E-mail address: [email protected] (Y.-H. Dang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.legalmed.2019.01.008 Received 10 July 2018; Received in revised form 24 November 2018; Accepted 18 January 2019 Available online 22 January 2019 1344-6223/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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2. Materials and methods

articles (n = 1591, 95.67%), the rest included reviews (n = 29. 1.74%), case reports (n = 28, 1.68%) and proceedings papers (n = 15, 0.91%). All the articles were published on 201 peer-reviewed journals. The total number of the citation of the 1663 articles was 24541, at the time of data analysis (23rd March 2018).

2.1. Search strategy In this retrospective study, we selected articles related to forensic anthropology indexed in Web of Science Core Collection and PubMed from 2008 to 2017. The search strategy was used as follow:

3.1. Annual output of articles

MeSH term and Topic: “forensic anthropology” Refined by: DOCUMENT TYPES: (ARTICLE OR REVIEW OR PROCEEDINGS PAPERS) Year published: 2008–2017 “Forensic anthropology” was applied as the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) term in PubMed and the time span was limited from 1st January 2008 to 31st December 2017. The search strategy was done on 23rd March 2018. Two investigators respectively perused information of the selected articles including titles, authors, published time, journals, abstracts and the full text. Through the above strategy, 1663 records were exported from the databases and imported to VOS viewer 1.6.7 and Citespace 5.2 for data analysis. The required articles information was also imported to Microsoft Excel 2016 (Microsoft, Redmond, USA) for a second round of data processing. The articles published by different countries and corporate or institutional affiliation were decided by the corresponding author. When articles could not be classified into subtopics based solely on metadata, the full text was read to make sure the accurate classification.

There were 1663 articles published and indexed in Web of Science Core Collection and PubMed, from 2008 to 2017. In the recent decade, the maximum of articles was published in 2015 (225 of 1663), while the minimum of articles was published in 2017 (85/1663). In addition, the tendency of annual scholarly output published around the world decreased tardily and the number of articles multiplied from 2010 to 2015 (Fig. 2). 3.2. Primary countries or regions There were 219 countries and regions around the world contributed to the articles on forensic anthropology, as shown in the world map (Fig. 3). 35 countries or regions published > 10 articles, 22 countries published > 20 articles and 10 countries published > 50 articles. The top 10 countries were shown in Fig. 4, which published 70.23% (1168/ 1663) of the whole articles. Among the top 10 countries, only two (i.e. India and South Africa) were developing countries with the definition of the United Nations, while the others were developed countries. 3.3. Primary journals

2.2. Inclusion and exclusion criteria The 1663 articles were published on 201 peer-reviewed journals during the past 10 years (Supplementary Fig. 1). 25 journals published > 5 articles, 19 journals published > 10 articles, 13 journals published > 20 articles. The most 10 productive journals published > 30 articles. Based on the Bradford’s law, Forensic Science International (405/1663) and Journal of Forensic Sciences (382/1663) met the standards of the core journals with the cumulative percentage reached 33% in the field of forensic anthropology. The top 10 journals published 72% (1198/1663) of the total articles. Almost all of them were in English except one in Chinese and one in Russian. Seven of the top 10 journals were indexed in JCR and their 5-year IF were listed in Table 1.

Studies related to forensic anthropology published on journals or academic conference were included. Two investigators read all articles including titles, abstracts and full text if necessary to make sure whether the studies should be included or not. Duplicate articles in different databases were counted only once. No language restrictions were made. The search strategy was shown in Fig. 1. 2.3. Data analysis To analyze the trends of publications around the world, the following indicators were selected: the number of articles published per year, top 10 journals contributed to publications, top 10 countries with the most articles published, top 10 productive authors, top 10 cited articles, top 20 terms and keywords, the distribution of forensic anthropological topics and 2 sub-topics (sex estimation and age estimation) for second analysis. Impact factors (IF) of top 10 journals were ascertained using Clarivate Analytics in 2017 Journal Cited Reports (JCR) (Clarivate Analytics, Philadelphia, USA). Here, we used the VOS viewer and Citespace to analyze the metadata. Both of them are professional software to establish and visualize the bibliometric networks. We finished the analysis of journal citation relationship, co-occurrence of keywords, co-occurrence of terms and contributions of researchers all over the world with density visualization maps, networking visualization maps or world map. In networking visualization maps, the thickness of the line between any two items reflects the strength of relationships, which is on the basis of the number of lines between the two items [17].

3.4. Prolific authors and their institutions Among the 3424 authors, 41 authors published > 10 articles, and 14 authors published > 15 articles. The top 10 prolific authors published > 16 articles, as displayed in Table 2. There are 11 authors in the top 10 list, because some of them published the same number of articles. Kanchan T was the most prolific author with 2.22% of total articles, following with Krishan K and Cattaneo C, who made coordinate contribution to the articles on forensic anthropology with 1.62% of total articles respectively. 3.5. Top 10 cited articles Forty articles were cited > 45 times and 16 articles were cited > 70 times. The top 10 cited articles were shown in Table 3. Four of top 10 cited articles were published on Journal of Forensic Sciences. Another 2 preferred journals were Forensic Science International and International Journal of Legal Medicine, which published 2 articles respectively. In particular, Kellinghaus M was the only one who published 2 of the top 10 cited articles.

3. Results Using the strategy as mentioned above, we retrieved 3319 articles, all of which were reviewed one by one and 1656 articles were excluded. Because they had nothing to do with forensic anthropology or they were duplicate. Finally, we selected 1663 articles for bibliometric analysis (Fig. 1). Among the 1663 articles, the majority were original

3.6. Top terms and keywords There were 28,381 terms that were extracted from titles and abstracts. The density visualization map included the top 100 terms with 68

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Fig. 1. Search Strategy.

Fig. 2). In addition, we displayed the top 20 keywords extracted from keywords and keywords plus in Table 4. Forensic anthropology was the most important keyword, which occurred in 520 articles (31.27%). From these keywords, some related to methods of investigation such as “bone”, “skull”, “skeletal remain”, “human remain”, etc. Others correlated to object of study (population, children) or the aim of forensic anthropology, for example “sex estimation”, “age estimation”, etc. 3.7. The distribution of topics In Table 5, we displayed the distribution of topics on forensic anthropology. The most 2 important topics discussed among the 1663 articles were sex estimation (320/1663, 19.24%) and age estimation (239/1663, 14.37%). The distribution of sub-topics including sex estimation and age estimation were exhibited in Table 6 and Table 7, respectively. Fig. 2. Annual Scientific Research Output from 2008 to 2017.

4. Discussion

the minimum co-occurrence times of 42 (Fig. 5). The top 20 terms were shown in Supplementary Table 1 with their co-occurrence times. The network visualization map included 484 from the total 4637 keywords with the minimum co-occurrence times of 5 (Supplementary

Bibliometric analysis is a type of studies that includes a set of visual and quantitative procedures using the information extracted from articles to evaluate scientific literatures. The augment of bibliometric studies has been carried out to find out the global tendency of forensic 69

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Fig. 3. Countries and regions published articles all over the world.

Science Core Collection and PubMed with the related articles on all peer-reviewed journals during 2008–2017 to reveal the global research trends on forensic anthropology. The appropriate terminology is the basis by which the related articles could be searched in Web of Science Core Collection and PubMed. The MeSH term is a controlled vocabulary, with the use of indexing and classifying articles. “Topic” in Web of Science Core Collection is similar to MeSH term in PubMed, and articles in Medline could also be retrieved from PubMed. “Forensic anthropology” was used as the MeSH term and topic to retrieve articles, and there were 1663 articles. After analysis of the co-occurrence terms and keywords, we found that forensic anthropology occurred 213 times as the term, far less than “identification” (638). Forensic anthropology occurred as the keyword in 520 articles (31.27%). These suggests that search strategy with keywords is not sufficient for indexing all wanted literatures, which is partial in accordance with studies conducted by the National Library of Medicine (USA) illustrating the influence of the indexing has already improved in retrieval contrasting with statistical methods or text word searching [24]. Based on bibliometric theory, the change of scientific output is an intuitionistic indicator reflecting the development of discipline [25]. A dramatic change of scientific output might be a principal turning point. In the present study, we observed the slow growth of articles from 2008 to 2015. An evidently increased number of articles was from 2010 to 2015, suggesting a rapid development of forensic anthropology. However, we found a consecutive declination of articles since 2016. The

Fig. 4. Top 10 countries published articles on forensic anthropology.

science and anthropology fields within a given topic, field, time span, institute or country [17–23]. As we know, Emanuela Gualdi-Russo published a bibliometric analysis on forensic anthropology in 2013. However, there were a few limitations in their study. Firstly, they focused on the articles that were published from 2000 to 2009. Secondly, they only selected the articles in the PubMed Central database. Thirdly, they only chose the published articles from Forensic Science International. Moreover, they roughly analyzed the frequency of skeletal versus nonskeletal biology articles and the distribution of topics by 2year intervals [2]. Therefore, in the current study, we selected Web of Table 1 Top 10 journals published articles on forensic anthropology. Journal

Country

Language

5-IF

Publications

Percentage of Total

Cumulative Percentage of Total

FORENSIC SCIENCE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES JOURNAL OF FORENSIC AND LEGAL MEDICINE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LEGAL MEDICINE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY JOURNAL OF FORENSIC ODONTOSTOMATOLOGY FORENSIC SCIENCE MEDICINE AND PATHOLOGY FA YI XUE ZA ZHI LEGAL MEDICINE SUDEBNO-MEDITSINSKAIA EKSPERTIZA

Ireland United States England Germany United States Australia United States China Japan Russia

English English English English English English English Chinese English Russian

1.974 1.184 1.103 2.316 2.984 NA 2.027 NA 1.254 NA

405 382 109 104 36 35 34 32 31 30

24.35% 22.97% 6.55% 6.25% 2.16% 2.10% 2.04% 1.92% 1.86% 1.80%

24.35% 47.32% 53.87% 60.12% 62.28% 64.38% 66.42% 68.34% 70.20% 72.00%

70

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Table 2 Top 10 prolific authors on forensic anthropology. Author

Publications

Institution

Kanchan T Krishan K Cattaneo C

37 27 27

Stephan CN

24

Telmon N Dedouit F

23 18

Cunha E

18

Rougé D

17

Iwase H

16

Steyn M

16

Gibelli D

16

Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur, India Department of Anthropology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India LABANOF (Laboratorio di Antropologia e Odontologia Forense), Dipartimento di Scienze Biomediche per la Salute, Sezione di Medicina Legale, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy Laboratory for Human Craniofacial and Skeletal Identification (HuCS-ID Lab), School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland, Australia AMIS Laboratory: University of Toulouse, French National Center for Scientific Research, Toulouse, France AMIS Laboratory: University of Toulouse, French National Center for Scientific Research, Toulouse, France Unit of Forensic and Anthropological Imaging, Centre Universitaire Romand de Médecine Légale (CURML), Switzerland Laboratory of Forensic Anthropology, Centre for Functional Ecology, Department of Life Sciences, University of Coimbra, Calçada Martim Freitas, Portugal Laboratoire d'Anthropobiologie AMIS, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France Service de Médecine Légale, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Rangueil, Toulouse, France Department of Forensic Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Japan Department of Legal Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, Chiba University, Japan Human Variation and Identification Research Unit, School of Anatomical Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa LAFAS, Laboratorio di Anatomia Funzionale dell'Apparato Stomatognatico, Dipartimento di Scienze Biomediche per la Salute, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy

published on 10 of the 16 journals. They were Forensic Science International (405/1663), Journal of Forensic Sciences (382/1663), Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine (109/1663), International Journal of Legal Medicine (104/1663), Forensic Science Medicine and Pathology (34/1663), Legal Medicine (31/1663), Forensic Science International-Genetics (22/1663), American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology (21/1663), Science & Justice (19/1663), and Medicine Science and The Law (15/1663). The other 6 journals without any articles on forensic anthropology were as follow: Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, Journal of Law Medicine & Ethics, Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences, Medical Law Review, Rechtsmedizin and Romanian Journal of Legal Medicine. We used 5year impact factor as an indicator to evaluate a journal, which considers the total number of citations published in a specific journal within 5 years. However, the 5-year IF is a relative qualitative indicator, it cannot reflect the citations of each article. Eight of the top 10 productive authors located in developed countries with 7 in Europe. Only 3 came from developing countries in Asia. As for the top 10 cited articles, authors in developed countries with half from USA published the whole articles. Even scientific research has developed rapidly in recent years, authors in most Asian countries and regions does not have a place on forensic anthropology. It probably because biomedical scientific research output largely relies on per capita gross national product of the country, the expenditure allotted for

possible explanation is that the studies have encountered a bottleneck or have some kind of restricted factors such as research materials, techniques, etc. The geographic distribution of scientific output could reflect research capabilities and technological progress of different countries [26]. The United States, of course, was the most productive country on forensic anthropology, which output was far more than the other top 10 countries. It is not surprised, because the USA leads the rankings in global research [27]. Nearly the top 10 productive countries were developed countries except India and South Africa. There might be some explanations. First, the quantity of scientific research output, focus and capability are based on national policy, population size and socioeconomic developmental statues of the country. Second, our search strategy was focused on Web of Science Core Collection and PubMed. We cannot find out all of the correlative journals because these databases prefer to English journals [28,29]. Parts of non-English articles were excluded. Third, it is worth noting that the first author might be a student from developing countries receiving a short-term scientific research training in developed countries, and the corresponding author from developed countries guided the articles published on the journal. Thus, it should be cautious to explain the results. Up to the year of 2017, the category of “MEDICINE, LEGAL” in Journal Citation Reports included 16 journals. We found that 68.67% (1142/1663) of the total articles and 9 of the top 10 cited articles were Table 3 Top 10 cited articles on forensic anthropology. Author (year of publication)

Title

Journal

Number of citations

Cunha E (2009) Walker PL (2008)

The problem of aging human remains and living individuals: A review Sexing skulls using discriminant function analysis of visually assessed traits

183 140

Kellinghaus M (2010)

Forensic age estimation in living subjects based on the ossification status of the medial clavicular epiphysis as revealed by thin-slice multidetector computed tomography Sex Estimation in Forensic Anthropology: Skull Versus Postcranial Elements Odor analysis of decomposing buried human remains Enhanced possibilities to make statements on the ossification status of the medial clavicular epiphysis using an amplified staging scheme in evaluating thin-slice CT scans Forensic age estimation in human skeletal remains: Current concepts and future directions Sexual dimorphism in America: Geometric morphometric analysis of the craniofacial region Facial Soft Tissue Depths in Craniofacial Identification (Part I): An Analytical Review of the Published Adult Data The forensic evaluation of burned skeletal remains: A synthesis

FORENSIC SCIENCE INTERNATIONAL AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LEGAL MEDICINE JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LEGAL MEDICINE

Spradley M (2011) Vass AA (2008) Kellinghaus M (2010)

Franklin D (2010) Kimmerle EH (2008) Stephan CN (2008) Ubelaker DH (2009)

71

121 107 95 92

LEGAL MEDICINE

88

JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES

87

JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES

85

FORENSIC SCIENCE INTERNATIONAL

78

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Fig. 5. Top 100 terms on forensic anthropology. The density reflected the co-occurrence times of terms. Table 4 Top 20 keywords on forensic anthropology. Keyword

Publications

Percentage of Total

Keyword

Publications

Percentage of Total

Forensic Anthropology Forensic Science Identification Sex Determination Age Estimation Bone Population Forensic Anthropology Population Data Dimorphism Children

520 475 229 219 201 136 110 96 88 78

31.27% 28.56% 13.77% 13.17% 12.09% 8.18% 6.61% 5.77% 5.29% 4.69%

Stature Skull Death Skeletal Remain Human Remain Femur Discriminant Function-Analysis Growth Computed Tomography Human Identification

70 65 63 61 61 60 60 59 55 54

4.21% 3.91% 3.79% 3.67% 3.67% 3.61% 3.61% 3.55% 3.31% 3.25%

scientific research and technology development from national finance [30]. There is a phenomenon that the international collaboration of worldwide authors becomes more and more frequent. Through cooperating with famous research groups, research findings are easily accessible to gain public finance. For authors, they can acquire opportunities to accomplish more outputs, citations and aspirations for superior prestige and visibility [18]. In forensic investigation, estimation of sex, age, race and stature are four important consecutive steps [9]. From 2000 to 2009, global forensic anthropology researchers paid more attention to age estimation, sex estimation, stature estimation and racial identification with 46.4% of total articles (70/151) [2]. In the present study, after statistics of these topics respectively, we found that sex estimation got the most attention with 19.24% of total articles (320/1663). Sex estimation is the first fundamental step for positive identification when recovering a decomposed body [31]. Normally, sex estimation is not a hard problem for scientists when the whole skeleton is available. However, in forensic cases, it is scare to find the complete skeleton, instead of human remains or skeletal fragments [32]. Skulls and pelvises analysis were traditional methods for sex estimation in forensic anthropology. With medical development, scientific and technological advance, some new

patterns were built in recent years. Typically, the application of patella was firstly reported in 2007 [33]. It was regarded as a novel, stable and particularly important material demonstrated in different countries such as Japan [34], USA [35], Spain [36] and Egypt [37], when only incomplete or fragmentary skeletal remains were discovered in some special cases. Similarly, cremated skeletal remains, firstly reported in 2011 [38], was a promising method with the mean value for the accuracy of 85.5% [39]. It is worth indicating that the development of medical imaging technology and the combination of medicine and engineering made forensic anthropology develop rapidly, especially with the application of X-rays [37,40], computed tomography [41], cone beam computed tomography [42], magnetic resonance imaging [43] and even digital 3D models [44]. It is more accurate and convenient contrasting with traditional morphological observation and geometric morphometric methods. The aim of age estimation is to determine the age of the deceased. Although this estimation will not provide a direct identification, it can devote to recognize a perished or exclude human remains as being those of a specific missing person [45]. It is not difficult for forensic anthropologists to determine the age-at-death in juveniles, by means of dentition, skeletal growth and so on [4]. However, the estimation of 72

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Table 5 The distribution of topics on forensic anthropology. Topic

Year

Total

2008–2012

%

2013–2017

%

Growth rate

N

%

Sex estimation Age estimation Facial identification Personal identification Stature estimation Estimation of postmortem interval Dental identification Examination protocol Civil actions Estimation of cause of injury DNA extraction from skeleton Racial identification Species identification Criminal actions Taphonomy Case report Discipline development Examination of hair Temperature estimation Examination of nail

151 121 61 68 75 84 53 42 47 43 31 20 13 15 16 12 9 4 1 0

17.44% 13.97% 7.04% 7.85% 8.66% 9.70% 6.12% 4.85% 5.43% 4.97% 3.58% 2.31% 1.50% 1.73% 1.85% 1.39% 1.04% 0.46% 0.12% 0.00%

169 118 70 57 44 25 54 49 41 38 23 23 21 18 17 16 9 1 3 1

21.20% 14.81% 8.78% 7.15% 5.52% 3.14% 6.78% 6.15% 5.14% 4.77% 2.89% 2.89% 2.63% 2.26% 2.13% 2.01% 1.13% 0.13% 0.38% 0.13%

3.77% 0.83% 1.74% −0.70% −3.14% −6.56% 0.66% 1.30% −0.28% −0.20% −0.69% 0.58% 1.13% 0.53% 0.29% 0.62% 0.09% −0.34% 0.26% 0.13%

320 239 131 125 119 109 107 91 88 81 54 43 34 33 33 28 18 5 4 1

19.24% 14.37% 7.88% 7.52% 7.16% 6.55% 6.43% 5.47% 5.29% 4.87% 3.25% 2.59% 2.04% 1.98% 1.98% 1.68% 1.08% 0.30% 0.24% 0.06%

Total

866

100.00%

797

100.00%

−7.97%

1663

100.00%

citations. So it is possible that there is a source of bias [54]. Despite the limitations, we think that this study provides a relative global view on forensic anthropology from 2008 to 2017. Depended on the bibliometric analysis, we updated the tendency of the discipline development and analyzed deeply with consulting the former articles in this field. The methodology we used in this study is basic and recognized. Some of our results might be compared and broadened in the future.

adult age has challenged anthropologists for a long time [32]. In the current study, we found that researchers still concentrated on this topic during the past 10 years, with a great quantity of articles published (14.37%, 239/1663). The conventional methods were using the skeletal morphological changes and geometric morphometric analysis [46]. With the evolution of high-tech, virtual anthropology is a new system for age estimation [47], including X-rays [48], computed tomography [49], multisliecs helieal computed tomography [50], magnetic resonance imaging [51], photographic technique [52] and 3D laser scan [53]. The advantage of the advanced technology is that the accuracy and efficiency of forensic investigation has been significantly improved. There are some limitations in the current study. First, we chose two databases preferred English articles, which lost some non-English articles. Second, the total citations recorded by databases including self-

Funding This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC No. 81771435, 81371473), the research project of State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering (SKLMS 2017002), and the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi

Table 6 The distribution of sub-topics on sex estimation. Sub-topics on sex estimation

Year

Total

2008–2012

%

2013–2017

%

Growth rate

N

%

Skull Pelvis Vertebra Sternum Rib Scapula Clavicle Long bone of upper limb Long bone of lower extremities Patella Calcaneus Medical imaging Dermatoglyphics Tooth Facial soft tissue DNA typing Bones of hand Cremated bones Hand length Foot length Over two methods Not mentioned

36 20 6 6 3 3 2 9 9 1 5 6 4 5 5 1 4 1 7 4 14 0

23.84% 13.25% 3.97% 3.97% 1.99% 1.99% 1.32% 5.96% 5.96% 0.66% 3.31% 3.97% 2.65% 3.31% 3.31% 0.66% 2.65% 0.66% 4.64% 2.65% 9.27% 0.00%

48 15 5 7 0 3 4 6 13 1 6 9 4 13 6 1 7 1 0 2 17 1

28.40% 8.88% 2.96% 4.14% 0.00% 1.78% 2.37% 3.55% 7.69% 0.59% 3.55% 5.33% 2.37% 7.69% 3.55% 0.59% 4.14% 0.59% 0.00% 1.18% 10.06% 0.59%

4.56% −4.37% −1.01% 0.17% −1.99% −0.21% 1.04% −2.41% 1.73% −0.07% 0.24% 1.35% −0.28% 4.38% 0.24% −0.07% 1.49% −0.07% −4.64% −1.47% 0.79% 0.59%

84 35 11 13 3 6 6 15 22 2 11 15 8 18 11 2 11 2 7 6 31 1

26.25% 10.94% 3.44% 4.06% 0.94% 1.86% 1.86% 4.69% 6.86% 0.63% 3.44% 4.69% 2.50% 5.63% 3.44% 0.63% 3.44% 0.63% 2.19% 1.88% 9.69% 0.31%

Total

151

100.00%

169

100.00%

11.92%

320

100.00%

73

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Table 7 The distribution of sub-topics on age estimation. Sub-topics on age estimation

Year

Total

2008–2012

%

2013–2017

%

Growth rate

N

%

Skull Pelvis Vertebra Sternum Rib Clavicle Long bone of lower extremities Bone histology Soft tissue Scapula Bones of hand Long bone of upper limb Tooth Patella Bones of foot Medical imaging Not mentioned Over two methods

15 16 4 1 7 6 1 8 3 0 4 2 8 1 0 7 5 33

12.40% 13.22% 3.31% 0.83% 5.79% 4.96% 0.83% 6.61% 2.48% 0.00% 3.31% 1.65% 6.61% 0.83% 0.00% 5.79% 4.13% 27.27%

15 20 2 0 0 8 1 1 4 1 2 4 10 3 2 8 3 34

12.71% 16.95% 1.69% 0.00% 0.00% 6.78% 0.85% 0.85% 3.39% 0.85% 1.69% 3.39% 8.47% 2.54% 1.69% 6.78% 2.54% 28.81%

0.32% 3.73% −1.61% −0.83% −5.79% 1.82% 0.02% −5.76% 0.91% 0.85% −1.61% 1.74% 1.86% 1.72% 1.69% 0.99% −1.59% 1.54%

30 36 6 1 7 14 2 9 7 1 6 6 18 4 2 15 8 67

12.55% 15.06% 2.51% 0.42% 2.93% 5.85% 0.84% 3.77% 2.93% 0.42% 2.51% 2.51% 7.53% 1.67% 0.84% 6.28% 3.35% 28.03%

Total

121

100.00%

118

100.00%

−2.48%

239

100.00%

Province of China (No. 2016JM8078) of Yong-Hui Dang.

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