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Review
. 2021 Oct 12:14:3207-3221.
doi: 10.2147/JPR.S331514. eCollection 2021.

Bibliometric Analysis of Research Trends on Acupuncture for Neck Pain Treatment Over the Past 20 Years

Jaehyeon Park #  1 , Hyungsuk Kim #  1   2 , Koh-Woon Kim  1 , Jae-Heung Cho  1   2 , Won-Seok Chung  1   2 , Mi-Yeon Song  1
Affiliations
Review

Bibliometric Analysis of Research Trends on Acupuncture for Neck Pain Treatment Over the Past 20 Years

Jaehyeon Park et al. J Pain Res. .

Abstract

A bibliometric approach using network analytical methods was applied to explore the research trends on acupuncture for neck pain treatment. Publications related to acupuncture for neck pain treatment from 2000 to 2020 were retrieved from the Web of Science database. The extracted records were analyzed in terms of publication year, research area, journal title, country, organization, authors, and keywords. The research trends on acupuncture for neck pain treatment were visualized using the VOSviewer program. Analyses of 325 articles revealed that the total number of publications has continually increased over the last 20 years. The most represented research area was integrative complementary medicine. The country producing the most articles was the US, followed by China, England, and the Republic of Korea. By assessing the total link strength of organizations and authors, we identified influential organizations and authors who have contributed to research on acupuncture for neck pain treatment. A network analysis based on the cooccurrence of keywords revealed the following two major study designs: clinical study and research methodology. This study examined the research trends on acupuncture for neck pain treatment using bibliometric methods. Our findings provide useful guidelines for researchers in searching for relevant topics.

Keywords: acupuncture; bibliometric analysis; cervical pain; neck pain; network analysis.

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Conflict of interest statement

JP and HK are the co-first authors. The authors report no conflicts of interest related to this work.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Distribution of publications by year.
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Figure 2
Figure 2
(A) Network map of the six clusters of organizations. (B) Network map of the organizations according to the average publication year. (C) A network map of organizations according to the average citations.
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Figure 3
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Figure 3
Figure 3
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Figure 3
Figure 3
(A) Network map of the six clusters of authors. (B) Network map of the authors according to the average publication year. (C) Network map of the authors according to the average number of citations.
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Figure 4
Figure 4
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Figure 4
Figure 4
(A) Analysis of the three clusters of keywords. (B) Analysis of the keywords according to the average publication year. (C) Analysis of the keywords according to the average number of citations.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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