A Bibliometric Analysis of Research Trends of Acupuncture Therapy in the Treatment of Migraine from 2000 to 2020

Abstract

Background: Migraine is the second-leading cause of disability worldwide. It is often characterized by attacks of severe, mostly unilateral, pulsating headache associated with symptoms such as photophobia, phonophobia, nausea, vomiting, and cutaneous allodynia. Acupuncture therapy has been used worldwide for the treatment of migraine. However, no visual bibliometric analysis has been conducted on the effects of acupuncture on migraine over the past 20 years. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the current status and trends on the use of acupuncture in the treatment of migraine from 2000 to 2020. Purpose: The objective of this study is to identify the current status and emerging trends of the global use of acupuncture on migraine from 2000 to 2020 using CiteSpace and VOSviewer. Methods: Web of Science databases were searched for publications related to acupuncture therapy for treating migraine between 2000 and 2020. CiteSpace and VOSviewer were used to analyze the number of publications per year, countries, institutions, authors, journals, references, and keywords. Results: A total of 572 publications were included in the final analysis. The total number of publications has continued to increase with some fluctuations over the past 20 years. The most productive country and institution in this field were the USA, and Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, respectively. The most active and cited authors were Liang FR and Linde K, respectively. Cephalalgia was the most productive, cited, and co-cited journal. The Linde K ( 2005) had the highest co-citation, citation number and centrality. The keywords "migraine" ranked first in frequency. The common type of migraine (tension-type headache), research method (randomized controlled trial, multicenter, double-blind), acupuncture's role (prophylactic, quality of life, pain), and evaluation (meta-analysis, systematic review) were the hotspots and frontier trends of acupuncture therapy on migraine between 2000 and 2020. Conclusion:The present study examined the research-related trend in acupuncture therapy on migraine using bibliometric methods and identified the statement and research frontiers over the past two decades. This may help researchers to identify potential hotspots and new directions for future research in this field.

Global Research Trends at the Intersection of Acupuncture and Headache Disorders: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The results from this present bibliometric analysis are comparable to ndings from previous publications of research at the intersection in question. The rst bibliometric analysis at the intersection of acupuncture and migraine explored the Web of Science databased for articles on the use of acupuncture for migraine treatment published between 2000 and 2020 [24]. The annual number of publications they reported followed a similar trend to those found in the present study, however, the number of publications they reported from 2011 to 2020 were noticeably greater than the gures we reported.…”

The application of acupuncture in cardiopathy: A bibliometric analysis based on Web of Science across ten recent years

“…There was no restriction on language, and we retrieved 801 studies. After eliminating meeting abstracts (14), editorial material (18), book chapters (3), letters (11), corrections (1) and articles not related to the search topic (433), we included 321 records (see the Supplementary Material), including 255 articles and 66 reviews, for further visualization and analysis. We saved these papers in a text document and named it "download_txt."…”

“…A total of 333 authors have taken part in research on acupuncture in relation to cardiopathies (Figure 4). Fanrong Liang from Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine ranked first with 21 publications, followed by Cunzhi Liu (12), Shengfeng Lu ( 12), Yu Wang ( 12), Jingwen Yang (11), Guangxia Shi ( 9), Liqiong Wang (7), Bingmei Zhu (7), Peijing Rong (7), and Chunzhi Tang (6). A noteworthy feature of this outcome is that the centrality of the authors was relatively low (less than 0.10), indicating that these authors have not established a close and influential cooperative network (Table 4A).…”

“…Because the structure, law, and distribution of scientific knowledge are presented through visualization, the visualization graph obtained through the examination of such methods is also called the “scientific knowledge map.” Cooperative network analysis, co-occurrence analysis, and co-citation analysis of the original literature can be performed based on the Java development environment. Recently, bibliometric analyses of acupuncture and obstetrical and gynecological diseases ( 10 ), migraine ( 11 ), insomnia ( 12 ), knee osteoarthritis ( 13 ), and cancer ( 14 ) have been reported, revealing the research progress and frontiers of acupuncture and related diseases. However, no report concerning the application of acupuncture in the treatment of cardiopathies based on bibliometric analysis has been found.…”

Alternative medicines worth researching? Citation analyses of acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, and osteopathy 1996–2017

“…Lower back pain acupuncture research is mostly from the USA and in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (Liang et al, 2017). Migrainerelated acupuncture research is most published in the USA and in the headache journal Cephalalgia (Zhao, 2021). The USA also published the most acupuncture research in obstetrics and gynaecology (Wu et al, 2021).…”