Background.
Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula (TCMF) study has been recognized widely by medical scientists around the world. However, few researchers have analyzed and summarized the rapid growth of academic articles of TCMF published in English. The primary aim of this work was to assess the outcome of these research outputs in the TCMF field from 2000 to 2016 and to evaluate the situation and tendency.
Methods
Research datasets were acquired from the Web of Science database, which includes all academic articles published from 2000 to 2016; articles were tracked by the keywords “Traditional Chinese Medicine”, “Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula”, and “Chinese herb formula”. Moreover, visualization software CiteSpace V was used to analyze and generate visualization knowledge maps. Results. In total, 26,917 articles appeared in the Web of Science database, and only 2,621 publications met requirement based on reading the abstract or full text. The annual publications total, list of journals, research interests, list of medicine names, disease types, and the top 20 cited articles were given in this research paper. In addition, we compared the research of Japan and Korea TCMF, in the appendix. Conclusion. This review demonstrates that increasingly more researchers have interest in the TCMF and TCMF has great significant advantages over other areas of focus. However, these publications were published rarely in top academic journals and most best-quality papers have bias toward medical analysis rather than pharmacology. To make a breakthrough in TCMF field, further investigation is required to place emphasis on the deepening study of the mechanism of related TCMF.
Background
Advances in modern science and technology have contributed greatly to the development of the pharmaceutical industry and clinical medicine. However, East Asian countries are still generally using Traditional Chinese Medicine due to the impact on culture and history. The WHO has asserted that the Traditional Medicine is one of the primary sources of healthcare [1]. Furthermore, because of Prof. Youyou Tu’s extraordinary achievement in using artemisinin treatment, she has been horned with the Physiology or Medicine Award from the Nobel Prize Organization in 2015. Hence, Traditional Chinese Medicine has attracted increasingly more attention in the global medical community [2]. In general, the Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula (TCMF) has two or more kinds of herbs as components, is designed for relatively certain symptoms, and is an important measure of the Chinese medicine treatment of diseases [3]. Knowledge regarding TCMF was not accepted in the Western Society in earlier years [4]; hence it was very hard to find the articles in peer-reviewed journals. Fortunately, the Chinese government constantly has supported the TCMF field, for example, the approval of the State Council, National Science & Technology Major Project of China “Key New Drug Creation and Manufacturing Program” launched in 2008. Thus, at a turning point, the year of 2010, the status of the Traditional Chinese Medicine has improved greatly, and the TCMF eventually has gained its deserved reputation.
Bibliometrics is a statistical analysis of written publications [5], and it is also a useful tool and method to evaluate or summarize research results in the particular field [6]. The vital indicator of estimating the quality of one article is citation rate [7]; citation analysis is necessary to provide a multidimensional summary for articles in a specific field. In addition, the TCMF research field is rich in intrinsic connection and external divergence because of its own characteristics. CiteSpace, an appropriate piece of software and a useful tool that focuses on visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature, was applied to conduct bibliometric analysis [8]. The results of the analysis are important for the future research of TCMF. Therefore, this paper considers bibliometrics from the perspective of article and citation analysis, which will help guide researchers or research funding agencies toward areas where there is lack of focus on research activity and provide the reader with insight and valuable information.
Methods
2.1. Search Strategy
Papers published from 2000 to 2016 were tracked by the keywords “Traditional Chinese Medicine”, “Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula”, and “Chinese Herb Formula” for inclusion in analysis and summarization, based on their presence in the Web of Science database. Web of Science is an online subscription-based scientific citation indexing service originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is the largest comprehensive academic information resource with the largest number of disciplines. It contains more than 12,000 core academic journals with the most influential research fields in natural sciences, engineering technology, and biomedicine [9].
During the article-collecting process, we encountered some difficulties such as “inaccurate screening result”—some formulae abbreviations or herb-pairs appear in the articles but without a detailed-explaining—and “undesired document type”—original and review articles are the only document types in this study, and meeting, editorial, and other document types are nontarget samples. Hence, these “biased articles” were not included in our finalized dataset. Therefore, the statistical analysis would be more trustworthy and accurate. The citations were gathered within one day on December 31, 2017, to avoid the possibility of unfairness due to the daily database update. The papers in this TCMF analysis were published in English in many international journals, all the authors are from China (including Mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan), and the first author’s region was determined by his/her organization regardless of citizenship and residence status
Methods
2.1. Search Strategy
Papers published from 2000 to 2016 were tracked by the keywords “Traditional Chinese Medicine”, “Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula”, and “Chinese Herb Formula” for inclusion in analysis and summarization, based on their presence in the Web of Science database. Web of Science is an online subscription-based scientific citation indexing service originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is the largest comprehensive academic information resource with the largest number of disciplines. It contains more than 12,000 core academic journals with the most influential research fields in natural sciences, engineering technology, and biomedicine [9].
During the article-collecting process, we encountered some difficulties such as “inaccurate screening result”—some formulae abbreviations or herb-pairs appear in the articles but without a detailed-explaining—and “undesired document type”—original and review articles are the only document types in this study, and meeting, editorial, and other document types are nontarget samples. Hence, these “biased articles” were not included in our finalized dataset. Therefore, the statistical analysis would be more trustworthy and accurate. The citations were gathered within one day on December 31, 2017, to avoid the possibility of unfairness due to the daily database update. The papers in this TCMF analysis were published in English in many international journals, all the authors are from China (including Mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan), and the first author’s region was determined by his/her organization regardless of citizenship and residence status
Methods
2.1. Search Strategy
Papers published from 2000 to 2016 were tracked by the keywords “Traditional Chinese Medicine”, “Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula”, and “Chinese Herb Formula” for inclusion in analysis and summarization, based on their presence in the Web of Science database. Web of Science is an online subscription-based scientific citation indexing service originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is the largest comprehensive academic information resource with the largest number of disciplines. It contains more than 12,000 core academic journals with the most influential research fields in natural sciences, engineering technology, and biomedicine [9].
During the article-collecting process, we encountered some difficulties such as “inaccurate screening result”—some formulae abbreviations or herb-pairs appear in the articles but without a detailed-explaining—and “undesired document type”—original and review articles are the only document types in this study, and meeting, editorial, and other document types are nontarget samples. Hence, these “biased articles” were not included in our finalized dataset. Therefore, the statistical analysis would be more trustworthy and accurate. The citations were gathered within one day on December 31, 2017, to avoid the possibility of unfairness due to the daily database update. The papers in this TCMF analysis were published in English in many international journals, all the authors are from China (including Mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan), and the first author’s region was determined by his/her organization regardless of
Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula (TCMF) study has been recognized widely by medical scientists around the world. However, few researchers have analyzed and summarized the rapid growth of academic articles of TCMF published in English. The primary aim of this work was to assess the outcome of these research outputs in the TCMF field from 2000 to 2016 and to evaluate the situation and tendency. Methods. Research datasets were acquired from the Web of Science database, which includes all academic articles published from 2000 to 2016; articles were tracked by the keywords “Traditional Chinese Medicine”, “Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula”, and “Chinese herb formula”. Moreover, visualization software CiteSpace V was used to analyze and generate visualization knowledge maps. Results. In total, 26,917 articles appeared in the Web of Science database, and only 2,621 publications met requirement based on reading the abstract or full text. The annual publications total, list of journals, research interests, list of medicine names, disease types, and the top 20 cited articles were given in this research paper. In addition, we compared the research of Japan and Korea TCMF, in the appendix. Conclusion. This review demonstrates that increasingly more researchers have interest in the TCMF and TCMF has great significant advantages over other areas of focus. However, these publications were published rarely in top academic journals and most best-quality papers have bias toward medical analysis rather than pharmacology. To make a breakthrough in TCMF field, further investigation is required to place emphasis on the deepening study of the mechanism of related TCMF.
1. Background
Advances in modern science and technology have contributed greatly to the development of the pharmaceutical industry and clinical medicine. However, East Asian countries are still generally using Traditional Chinese Medicine due to the impact on culture and history. The WHO has asserted that the Traditional Medicine is one of the primary sources of healthcare [1]. Furthermore, because of Prof. Youyou Tu’s extraordinary achievement in using artemisinin treatment, she has been horned with the Physiology or Medicine Award from the Nobel Prize Organization in 2015. Hence, Traditional Chinese Medicine has attracted increasingly more attention in the global medical community [2]. In general, the Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula (TCMF) has two or more kinds of herbs as components, is designed for relatively certain symptoms, and is an important measure of the Chinese medicine treatment of diseases [3]. Knowledge regarding TCMF was not accepted in the Western Society in earlier years [4]; hence it was very hard to find the articles in peer-reviewed journals. Fortunately, the Chinese government constantly has supported the TCMF field, for example, the approval of the State Council, National Science & Technology Major Project of China “Key New Drug Creation and Manufacturing Program” launched in 2008. Thus, at a turning point, the year of 2010, the status of the Traditional Chinese Medicine has improved greatly, and the TCMF eventually has gained its deserved reputation.
Bibliometrics is a statistical analysis of written publications [5], and it is also a useful tool and method to evaluate or summarize research results in the particular field [6]. The vital indicator of estimating the quality of one article is citation rate [7]; citation analysis is necessary to provide a multidimensional summary for articles in a specific field. In addition, the TCMF research field is rich in intrinsic connection and external divergence because of its own characteristics. CiteSpace, an appropriate piece of software and a useful tool that focuses on visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature, was applied to conduct bibliometric analysis [8]. The results of the analysis are important for the future research of TCMF. Therefore, this paper considers bibliometrics from the perspective of article and citation analysis, which will help guide researchers or research funding agencies toward areas where there is lack of focus on research activity and provide the reader with insight and valuable information.
2. Methods
2.1. Search Strategy
Papers published from 2000 to 2016 were tracked by the keywords “Traditional Chinese Medicine”, “Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula”, and “Chinese Herb Formula” for inclusion in analysis and summarization, based on their presence in the Web of Science database. Web of Science is an online subscription-based scientific citation indexing service originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is the largest comprehensive academic information resource with the largest number of disciplines. It contains more than 12,000 core academic journals with the most influential research fields in natural sciences, engineering technology, and biomedicine [9].
During the article-collecting process, we encountered some difficulties such as “inaccurate screening result”—some formulae abbreviations or herb-pairs appear in the articles but without a detailed-explaining—and “undesired document type”—original and review articles are the only document types in this study, and meeting, editorial, and other document types are nontarget samples. Hence, these “biased articles” were not included in our finalized dataset. Therefore, the statistical analysis would be more trustworthy and accurate. The citations were gathered within one day on December 31, 2017, to avoid the possibility of unfairness due to the daily database update. The papers in this TCMF analysis were published in English in many international journals, all the authors are from China (including Mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan), and the first author’s region was determined by his/her organization regardless of citizenship and residence status.
2.2. Data Analysis
The papers search from the Web of Science were transferred to EndNote X7 (Thomson Reuters, San Francisco, CA) for classification and statistical analysis. Basic information such as year of publications, journals, region, and citations was recorded directly for analysis. The following information, research interest, medicine name, and disease type, was reviewed by reading the abstract or full text for statistics. Finally, the result sorting process was generated by Microsoft Office Excel® 2007. The categorical data are presented as integer and percentages. CiteSpace V was used to visualize and verify the high-frequency keywords, categories, and authors in a graphical way [10]. The parameters of CiteSpace V were as follows: time slicing (2000–2016), years per slice (1), term source (all selection), node type (choose one at a time), selection criteria (top 50), and pruning (pathfinder).
With the purpose of conducting deeper research and evaluating the international recognition of TCMF, we also screened TCMF-related articles from Japanese and South Korean publications by using the same methodology and then alphabetized the TCMF in a descending order (Z-A) according to Chinese Pinyin, Japanese Romaji, and South Korean Romaji. Please refer to the Supplementary Materials for details.
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