Integrative Oncology from a Bibliometric Point of View

Objectives: The aim of this article is to analyze the development of integrative oncology from a bibliometric point of view. The publication and citation patterns of publications are analyzed and their contents mapped. Design: This study is based on bibliometric methods. The data sets consist of 7 025 respectively 4 990 publications over the time period 1966-2016, shown in PubMed and Web of Science. Results: The expansion of the numbers of these publications took place in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Research is dominated by authors located in the USA, China and Germany who are working at well-established research universities and university hospitals. The clinical share of publications is relatively small, and few studies are classified according to clinical phase. Content analysis revealed that much of the clinical research is based on surveys, and that content reflects the intersection of complementary therapies and cancer research. The latter aspect is less obvious in pre-clinical research. The most frequent journals in the material show a focus on complementary and alternative therapies or on integrative oncology, although journals focused on oncology or general/internal medicine were well-represented in the material as a whole. The most-cited publications were review articles and surveys. Conclusions: Integrative oncology has been established as a small, but distinct, research domain. There are several signs of specialization in integrative oncology, but also in its integration into general medical and oncological research

Fifty Years of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) : a Bibliometric Analysis of Publication Activity and General Content of the Publications

The aim of this article is to analyze the development of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as a research domain over the period 1966-2016. Using bibliometric methods, the publication pattern will be analyzed with a focus on journal articles and sources. Furthermore, we will analyze the development of clinical research and map the general content of the publications. The data set consist of 105 216 publications, that have Complementary Therapies as their MeSH major topic, in the Medline database. The expansion of CAM research took place in the late 1990s. At the end of the time period about 20 percent of the publications were classified as clinical trials, but relatively few according to clinical phase. A majority of the core journals, defined by the Bradford law of scattering, showed a focus on CAM. The impact of these journals, measured by SNIP values, were close to the average. The analysis of MeSH terms revealed that the dominating therapies were Muscoskeletal manipulations, Acupuncture Therapy and Mind Body Therapies. The co-word analysis of author keywords showed that Acupuncture were the largest single node. Furthermore, it was possible to detect a specific CAM cluster. CAM has developed to a small but distinct research domain. There are signs of specialization in/about CAM as well as integration in other medical sub-fields. Furthermore, there are signs of a young medical domain, characterized by small and exploratory clinical studies.