ReviewGlobal trends and performances of acupuncture research
Research highlights
▶ Acupuncture research overview in the Science Citation Index-Expended. ▶ The most published institutions and countries for acupuncture research around the world. ▶ Pain control has been the most prevalent direction of acupuncture studies. ▶ Brain imaging is attracting the most recent attention. ▶ The importance of control group in clinical trial for acupuncture treatment.
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.
Section snippets
Method
The data were from the online version of SCI-Expanded, Web of Science. According to Journal Citation Reports (JCR), it indexed 7,347 major journals with citation references across 174 scientific disciplines in 2009. “Electroacupuncture”, “electro-acupuncture”, “acupoint*”, “acupunctur*”, and “percutaneous electrical nerve stimulation” were used as keywords to search titles, abstracts, and keywords from 1991 to 2009. The word “acupoint*” might stand for “acupoint” and “acupoints”; and
Document type and language of publication
There were 6,004 publications with 13 document types indexed in the SCI-Expanded, which include 3,975 articles. The article, as the most popular document type, comprises 66% of the total production and was followed distantly by reviews (508; 8.5%), letters (458; 7.6%), meeting abstracts (457; 7.6%), editorial materials (286; 4.8%), proceedings papers (213; 3.5%), and the remainder having less significance were news items (38), corrections (32), notes (24), reprints (6), book reviews (4),
Two waves of development of acupuncture-related literature
From the historical point of view, the first surge shown in Fig. 1 may be related with the clinical practice of “acupuncture anesthesia” in China when acupuncture was used as a technique to induce analgesic effect in place of anesthetics during surgical procedures. That was started in the late-1950s (Wu, 2007). This non-conventional practice raised the interest of not only medical professionals over the world, but also basic researchers who would like to explore the possible mechanisms. The
Conclusions
Thirteen document types were used in acupuncture publications. English was the most predominant language used by the scientists for communication. 3,975 articles were published in 927 different journals which were listed in 117 SCI subject categories during 1991–2009. Fifty percent of articles were inter-institutionally collaborative articles. Fourteen percent of articles were internationally collaborative articles. The most productive institutes were Kyung Hee University at South Korea and
Acknowledgement
This work was supported in part by the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2007CB512501) to Ji-Sheng HAN.
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