Research Trends on Acupuncture for Shoulder Pain Treatment Over the Past 15 Years: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Objective: Currently, acupuncture for shoulder pain has been widely used in clinical and scientific research worldwide, but the bibliometric literature on acupuncture for shoulder pain is still scarce. This study reviews the application of acupuncture in the treatment of shoulder pain over the past 15 years, to analyze the current state of research, research hotspots, and trends. The article can also provide a reference for future research. Methods: This paper searches the core collection of the Web of Science database for publications related to acupuncture therapy for shoulder pain between 2008 and 2022. And the data were visualized and analyzed using VOSviewer and CiteSpace for annual publications, countries, institutions, journals and co-cited journals, authors and co-cited authors, keywords, and emergent keywords. Results: A total of 135 papers were included, with an overall increasing trend in the number of annual publications. The country with the highest centrality in publishing articles is the United States (0.28). In terms of research institutions, Kyung Hee University has the highest number of publications (18).

Knowledge mapping of acupoint sensitization and acupoint specificity: a bibliometric analysis

“…Bibliometrics is a method of literature analysis that allows for quantitative and qualitative analysis of detailed information about authors, keywords, journals, countries, institutions, references, etc., in a relevant field of study, and can be used to analyze the publications’ output in a specific field of study from multiple perspectives ( Wang et al, 2019 ; Ke et al, 2020 ). Commonly used bibliometric tools such as CiteSpace ( Synnestvedt et al, 2005 ), VOSviewer ( Yeung et al, 2020 ), the R package “Bibliometrix” ( Li et al, 2020 ), and HistCite ( Lu et al, 2020 ) can be used to visualize and analyze the results, and in recent years, have been widely used in the field of acupuncture and moxibustion research, such as lumbar pain ( Jiao et al, 2022 ), myofascial syndromes ( Luo et al, 2023 ), shoulder pain ( Xu et al, 2023 ), vomiting ( Tan et al, 2023 ), neck pain ( Gong et al, 2023 ), and facial paralysis ( Yu et al, 2023 ). These studies have focused on the assessment of the clinical efficacy of acupuncture, however, bibliometric studies on the essence of acupoint sensitization and acupoint specificity have not yet been reported.…”