Quantitative and Qualitative Assessment of Persian Medicine Articles Indexed in Pubmed by the End of 2015

Persian (Iranian) medicine is one of the oldest traditional medical science with more than 1000 years of history. Scientometrics studies on the current research achievement of Persian medicine in academic communities are lacking. The purpose of this study is assessment and analysis of scientific attainment of Persian medicine in international research publication and provides overview of research efforts in the field of Persian traditional medicine until 2015.
Documents were collected from Pub Med database with these keywords: “Iranian medicine”, “Persian medicine”, “Iranian traditional medicine” and “Persian traditional medicine”. All data were classified based on type of manuscript, field of study, kind of research, journal type and publication year.
FINDINGS: 502 Articles were found up to the end of 2015; 54.3% original articles, 26% review, 13.7% letter to editor, 29% biographical and historical articles. Pharmacological and phytochemical studies were the most published articles (14/7%). Between 139 journals which published these articles, 59% have Impact factor (IF) and highest IF belonged to the Lancet neurol J (23/46). More than one citation was reported in 43.7% of articles and the most citation belong to the one of the published article in year 2012 (23 citation). H-Index of all collected articles was 12.
The number of published articles in Persian (Iranian) Medicine had significant growth in the last years. But usage of several keywords for Persian traditional medicine, by authors, inhibits aggregation and availability to these. However proposed unique full or abbreviate name be used in all published research document.