Global trends and performances of acupuncture research

Abstract

This study was designed to evaluate the global scientific output of acupuncture research in the Science Citation Index-Expanded and to assess the tendencies and research performances of leading countries/territories and institutes. Articles referring to acupuncture were assessed by distribution of document types, languages, journals, subject categories, source countries, and source institutes. Results showed that 15 languages were represented in articles from 65 countries/territories. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine published the most articles, followed by American Journal of Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture & Electro-Therapeutics Research which were listed in category of integrative & complementary medicine. In the study period of 1991–2009, USA was the top producing country, followed by China (mainland) with a sharply growth trend. In 2009, publication of China (mainland) ranked top one in the world. In addition, an acupuncture research trend was found in two phases in terms of the increase of number of SCI-expanded journals’ articles. Among the acupuncture research, pain control has been the most prevalent direction of study, and brain imaging is attracting the most recent attention.

Introduction

Acupuncture originated in China over three thousand years ago and was widely accepted in Chinese society. In 1979, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a symposium in Beijing, China to identify the conditions that might benefit from the therapy (World Health Organization, 2002). The international participants drew up a list of 43 suitable diseases. However, that was not based on formal clinical trials. In 2002, the WHO published a book entitled “Acupuncture: Review and Analysis of Reports on Controlled Clinical Trials”, in which 29 conditions were identified for which acupuncture has been proved, through controlled trials, to be an effective treatment. Among the 29 conditions, 12 were related with pain. Today, the analgesic effect of acupuncture is well established, although controversy still exists whether acupuncture can be regarded as a stand-alone technique for the treatment of various kinds of disease (Dajczman et al., 1991, Ulett et al., 1998). After four decades of intense basic research and clinical practice, it is time to have a global look at the history and current situation of acupuncture research.

Bibliometrics is a type of research method used in library and information sciences. It utilizes quantitative analysis and statistics to describe patterns of publications within a given topic, field, institute, or country. This paper was aimed to study all of the literatures related with acupuncture that published in journals listed in Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-Expanded). Bibliometric method has already been applied to traditional medical related topics such as rehabilitation (Tesio et al., 1995), AIDS (Macias-Chapula, 2000), cancer molecular epidemiology (Ugolini et al., 2007), tuberculosis (Ramos et al., 2008), Parkinson's disease (Li et al., 2008), and Alzheimer's disease (Sorensen, 2009). In addition, topics related to complementary and alternative medicine were also reported (Danell and Danell, 2009), such as acupuncture (Zhang, 1995), qigong (Zhang et al., 1997), homeopathy (Chiu and Ho, 2005), and Chinese medicine (Leung et al., 2006). The SCI-Expanded, from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science databases, is the most frequently used source database for a broad review of scientific accomplishment in all fields.

In this study, a bibliometric method was used for the analysis of languages, subject categories, journals, article countries/territories, and article institutes to describe the performances and research trends in acupuncture. In addition, discussion on some interesting issues emerging on the path of acupuncture research was also presented.