Evaluation of 100 most cited research articles on African medicinal plants

Abstract

The mission for drug discovery and progress has prompt researchers to scientifically validate the therapeutic uses of medicinal plants available worldwide, of which, African medicinal plants serve as a great reservoir. Despite the extensive work in the field of medicinal plants of African origin, however, bibliometric report on the work conducted on African medicinal plants is scarce, and hence, the present study aimed at evaluating the top 100 most cited articles on medicinal plant wealth of Africa. The literature data used for the bibliometric analysis was explored from Web of Science (WoS) while RStudio and VOSviewer software were used for data analysis and collaboration network visualization, respectively. The most prolific authors were Van Staden J, Jager AK, Teklehaymanot T whereas, the top 3 journals were Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, and South African Journal of Botany. Most cited journals were Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Phytochemistry, Phytotherapy Research. The topmost institutions in terms of the number of articles were the University of KwaZulu-Natal, University of Addis Ababa and Pretoria. South Africa was the most cited country followed by Nigeria. Single country publications dominated the field and therefore, multiple country collaboration should be a focus of social networks among the researchers in the field.

The scholarly publishing landscape of ethnobotany in the Philippines

“…This is similar to Indian ethnobotany where the Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge only accounted to 17.33% of the 2123 papers examined (Pathak & Bharati 2020). The Journal of Ethnopharmacology which is the most impactful journal in this present study also has the highest citation count in the bibliometric analyses conducted in Indian ethnobotany (Pathak & Bharati 2020), African medicinal plants (Okaiyeto & Oguntibeju 2021), and the field of ethnopharmacology (Yeung et al 2018). Together with Economic Botany, these respected journals are known to publish high-quality papers on medicinal plants (Stepp 2018).…”

A Systematic Review on Amaranthus-Related Research

“…The Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) on the Web of Science (WoS) database was explored, as described by [72,73], to retrieve data on Amaranthus research from 2011 to 2020. The title search was selected and the keyword "(Amaranthus* OR amaranth*)" was used to retrieve publications on the subject within the specified period.…”

“…The University of Illinois belonged to cluster 3 and had the highest number of documents (55) with 25 links and a total link strength of 35.00, followed by the University of Arkansas in the cluster group with 45 documents, 20 links, and a total link strength of 25.00 (Figure 5). The size of the circle reflects the average number of documents associated with the institution and the length and thickness of the lines between the two institutions show their collaboration [72]. Institutions with more collaborations had higher research outputs than those with low collaborations.…”