Objective
Despite disparities in the availability and quality of emergency care, the extent to which countries with different incomes participate in research on emergency medicine (EM) remains understudied. This study evaluated productivity in EM research depending on national income.
Methods
Research published since 2004 in Scopus-indexed journals dealing with EM was analyzed quantitatively. Publication, citation, journal impact, and national socioeconomic data were compared. Automated topic modeling was applied using a latent Dirichlet allocation model.
Results
The analysis included 154,458 publications (89.7% in English) from 177 countries. The studies received 1,817,635 citations. High-income countries (HICs) outperformed upper-middle-income countries (UMICs), lower-middle-income countries (LMICs), and low-income countries (LICs) by 11-, 41-, and 72-fold, respectively, by the weighted number of publications (per million population per country) by 21-, 54-, and 171-fold, respectively, and by the weighted count of citations. The annual number of publications is predicted to rise considerably for HICs, to a lesser extent for UMICs, and to far less for LMICs, but not for LICs. Research productivity was significantly related to national socioeconomic indicators. Topic modeling revealed that HICs pay relatively more attention to advances in resuscitation, whereas LICs focus more on injuries.
Conclusion
. While global research productivity for EM is rising, LICs lag far behind HICs. Priorities in EM research differ among countries with different incomes. The development of country-specific EM research agendas would help boost national academic productivity and determine context-appropriate interventions for improving outcomes in emergency care.

Prompt activation of emergency medical services (EMS) constitutes the fundamental component of bystander response to time-dependent health crises. A clear understanding of the public ability to access EMS can help to guide interventions aimed at enhancing community preparedness for emergencies. This review was conducted to summarize studies that examined public knowledge of emergency phone numbers. This scoping review encompassed articles published since 2004 that reported the proportion of subjects who knew emergency phone numbers. Data sources included PubMed, Google Scholar, and references of included articles. Relevant data from eligible publications were extracted manually to an author-developed data-charting sheet and analyzed descriptively. Forty-eight articles were analyzed. Reported studies, mostly cross-sectional surveys, were conducted in 26 countries, including 16 high-income, 9 middle-income, and 1 low-income country. The percentage of subjects who knew emergency numbers varied from 0% to 97.8% (median, 64.3%; interquartile range [IQR], 32.8%–80.0%). For high-income countries, the median was significantly higher than for low- and middle-income nations (69.6% [IQR, 54.1%–84.2%] vs. 34.6% [IQR, 19.4%–61.5%], P=0.003). The studies were generally inconsistent regarding the association of subjects’ sociodemographic factors with knowledge of emergency numbers, suggesting the existence of geography-specific patterns. Available studies observed low community knowledge of emergency numbers, especially in low- and middle-income countries, and suggest that the problem has a global scale. Further research efforts are required to determine the best strategies for enhancing the public ability to access EMS.