The Arab world's contribution to solid waste literature: a bibliometric analysis

BACKGROUND: Environmental and health-related effects of solid waste material are considered worldwide problems. The aim of this study was to assess the volume and impact of Arab scientific output published in journals indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) on solid waste. METHODS: We included all the documents within the SCI whose topic was solid waste from all previous years up to 31 December 2012. In this bibliometric analysis we sought to evaluate research that originated from Arab countries in the field of solid waste, as well as its relative growth rate, collaborative measures, productivity at the institutional level, and the most prolific journals. RESULTS: A total of 382 (2.35 % of the overall global research output in the field of solid waste) documents were retrieved from the Arab countries. The annual number of documents published in the past three decades (1982–2012) indicated that research productivity demonstrated a noticeable rise during the last decade. The highest number of articles associated with solid waste was that of Egypt (22.8 %), followed by Tunisia (19.6), and Jordan (13.4 %). the total number of citations over the analysed years at the date of data collection was 4,097, with an average of 10.7 citations per document. The h-index of the citing articles was 31. Environmental science was the most researched topic, represented by 175 (45.8 %) articles. Waste Management was the top active journal. The study recognized 139 (36.4 %) documents from collaborations with 25 non-Arab countries. Arab authors mainly collaborated with countries in Europe (22.5 %), especially France, followed by countries in the Americas (9.4 %), especially the USA. The most productive institution was the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, with 6.3 % of total publications. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the expected increase in solid waste production from Arab world, research activity about solid waste is still low. Governments must invest more in solid waste research to avoid future unexpected problems. Finally, since solid waste is a multidisciplinary science, research teams in engineering, health, toxicology, environment, geology and others must be formulated to produce research in solid waste from different scientific aspects

Dental caries in primary and permanent teeth in children's worldwide, 1995 to 2019: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: Early childhood caries (ECC) is a type of dental caries in the teeth of infants and children that is represented as one of the most prevalent dental problems in this period. Various studies have reported different types of prevalence of dental caries in primary and permanent teeth in children worldwide. However, there has been no comprehensive study to summarize the results of these studies in general, so this study aimed to determine the prevalence of dental caries in primary and permanent teeth in children in different continents of the world during a systematic review and meta-analysis. Methods: In this review study, articles were extracted by searching in the national and international databases of SID, MagIran, IranMedex, IranDoc, Cochrane, Embase, ScienceDirect, Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science (ISI) between 1995 and December 2019. Random effects model was used for analysis and heterogeneity of studies was evaluated by using the I2 index. Data were analyzed by using the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis (Version 2) software. Findings: In this study, a total of 164 articles (81 articles on the prevalence of dental caries in primary teeth and 83 articles on the prevalence of dental caries in permanent teeth) were entered the meta-analysis. The prevalence of dental caries in primary teeth in children in the world with a sample size of 80,405 was 46.2% (95% CI: 41.6–50.8%), and the prevalence of dental caries in permanent teeth in children in the world with a sample size of 1,454,871 was 53.8% (95% CI: 50–57.5%). Regarding the heterogeneity on the basis of meta-regression analysis, there was a significant difference in the prevalence of dental caries in primary and permanent teeth in children in different continents of the world. With increasing the sample size and the year of study, dental caries in primary teeth increased and in permanent teeth decreased. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that the prevalence of primary and permanent dental caries in children in the world was found to be high. Therefore, appropriate strategies should be implemented to improve the aforementioned situation and to troubleshoot and monitor at all levels by providing feedback to hospitals