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. 2020 Feb 11:13:367-376.
doi: 10.2147/JPR.S235047. eCollection 2020.

Bibliometric Analysis of Research Assessing the Use of Acupuncture for Pain Treatment Over the Past 20 Years

In-Seon Lee  1 , Hyangsook Lee  1   2 , Yi-Hung Chen  3 , Younbyoung Chae  1
Affiliations

Bibliometric Analysis of Research Assessing the Use of Acupuncture for Pain Treatment Over the Past 20 Years

In-Seon Lee et al. J Pain Res. .

Abstract

Objective: A bibliometric approach using quantitative analytical methods was applied to explore the development of research investigating acupuncture for the treatment of pain. This study also evaluated the current status of acupuncture analgesia with a visualization analysis of journal articles.

Methods: Articles on acupuncture for pain control that were published from 2000 to 2019 were retrieved from the Web of Science database. Extracted records were analyzed in terms of year of publication, country, journal, research area, authors, and organizational affiliations. The VOSviewer program was used to visualize trends in research on acupuncture for pain control.

Results: Analyses of 4595 original and review articles revealed that the total number of publications has continually increased over the last 20 years. The country producing the most articles in this field was the United States, followed by China and South Korea. A network analysis based on the cooccurrence of keywords revealed the following three major types of studies: clinical studies, pain management studies, and mechanism studies.

Conclusion: The present study evaluated research on acupuncture for pain control using bibliometric methods and revealed current trends in acupuncture analgesia research, as well as potential future hot spots of research in this field.

Keywords: acupuncture; analgesia; bibliometric analysis; network analysis; pain.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest regarding this paper and that the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Number of publications investigating acupuncture and pain by year, over the past 20 years.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Analysis of keywords. (A) Mapping of keywords of studies pertaining to acupuncture and pain (categorized into three groups). (B) Distribution of keywords according to average publication year (blue: earlier, red: later).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Network map of study authors. (A) Of the 16,577 authors (classified into seven clusters), 46 had at least 15 publications. (B) Distribution of authors according to citations.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Network map of organizational affiliations. (A) Of the 3899 organizations (classified into seven clusters), 53 were affiliated with at least 30 publications. (B) Distribution of organizations according to citations.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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