Analysis of Publication Trends and Visualization of Scientific Structure in the Field of Traditional Medicine

Traditional medicine (TM) or complementary medicine is an old method based on culture, which has been developed in various forms of indigenous therapeutic methods in different societies. This research was conducted with the aim of analyzing the publication trend and visualizing the scientific structure of TM.

This study was carried out with a scientometric approach. The statistical population included 29,852 documents indexed in the TM field at the WoS database during the period of 2012 to 2020. The Excel and VOSviewer software were used for data analysis.

The findings showed that the scientific outputs of TM during the period studied had had an upward trend with 343,700 citations. Two universities in South Korea, namely Kyung Hee University and Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine (KIOM), had had the largest number of publications in this field. Further analysis of the data revealed that the highest levels of cooperation occurred between China and the US (565 cooperations), followed by China and Australia (253 cooperations) and China and the UK (134 cooperations). Finally Iran was found globally to have ranked fourth as regards TM publications and to be the most highly specialized country (in terms of RSI) in this field. This would necessitate more attention to appropriate scientific policy-making on the part of the responsible officials.

The cumulative frequency of publications in the field of traditional medicine in 2030 will be twice that in 2020. This trend would require special attention in scientific policy-making.