Research trends in complementary and alternative treatments for insomnia over the past decade: A bibliometrics analysis

Abstract

Insomnia is the most common sleep disorder, with persistent insomnia being associated with greater risk and leading to a range of functional consequences that place a heavy burden on patients and healthcare systems. A weight of evidence has shown that complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) seems to have a positive effect on improving sleep. However, the research trends of CAM intervention for insomnia have not been studied systematically through bibliometrics. We searched the relevant literature over the past decade in the Web of Science Core Collection database on September 20, 2022 and used CiteSpace and gCLUTO to visually analyze and cluster countries, institutions, authors, journals and keywords. Through screening, 1655 papers were included. In the past decade, the number of articles published in this field shown an annual trend of growth, with explosive growth in 2020. The USA has the largest number of publications, the University of Hong Kong is the leading institution in this field, and the most cited journal is Sleep. Mental condition and quality of life in patients with insomnia, insomnia related to cancer, effect of mindfulness meditation, yoga and aromatherapy on insomnia and the psychiatric symptoms resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic are at the forefront of this field. In this study, bibliometrics and visualization analysis were performed on related studies on CAM intervention for insomnia. This will be the focus and development direction of insomnia treatment in the future to formulate structured treatment plans for traditional Chinese medicine-related CAM, validate large-scale clinical trials, solve cancer comorbidity insomnia and related psychiatric symptoms and deal with mental health-related insomnia after public health outbreaks.

Managing depression with complementary and alternative medicine therapies: a scientometric analysis and visualization of research activities

“…Although 7,638 scholars contributed to the current research theme, most of the cooperation between them is limited to the same country or same institution. Such forms of collaboration with close internal connection but less external connection restricts the sharing of resources, ideas, and the exchange and discussion of individual perspectives among researchers ( 26 ). To produce more high-quality outputs in the current research field, cross-team (i.e., cross-institutional and cross-regional) collaboration is warranted.…”

“…Besides overviewing historical trends and current research status, scientometric analysis provides clues to future promising research directions ( 26 ). Inflammation, psychological stress and mindfulness were identified as potential research priorities in the future ( Figure 8 ).…”

“…The identification of the dynamic evolution of disciplinary development from extremely large corpora of associated research papers, however, represents a considerable challenge to scientific scholars ( 25 ). The scientometric analysis is a powerful quantitative approach to analyze the distribution structure, quantitative relationship and change rules of documents, using mathematics, statistics and other estimation and measurement techniques ( 26 ). Compared with a traditional narrative review by experts, which usually subjectively focus on the progress in a specific research field, scientometric analysis is advantageous in objectively, comprehensively, and quantitatively summarizing the whole topic based on the information best available ( 27 , 28 ).…”