BackgroundSummer acupoint herbal patching (SAHP) has been widely used in China for thousands of years. This bibliometric analysis aims to provide a comprehensive review of the characteristics of clinical studies on SAHP for any condition.MethodsWe included clinical studies such as randomized clinical trials (RCTs), controlled clinical studies (CCTs), case series (CSs), case reports (CRs), and cross-sectional studies on SAHP for any condition. Six databases were searched from date of inception to March 2015. Bibliometric information and study details such as study type, characteristics of participants, details of the intervention and comparison, and outcome were extracted and analyzed.ResultsA total of 937 clinical studies were identified and which were published between 1977 and 2015. This included 404 RCTs, 52 CCTs, 458 CSs, 19 CRs and 4 cross-sectional studies and involved 232,138 participants aged 2 to 90 years from two countries. Almost all studies were from China (936, 99.89 %). The five conditions most commonly treated by SAHP were asthma (401, 42.80 %), chronic bronchitis (146, 15.58 %), allergic rhinitis (117, 12.49 %), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (73, 7.79 %), and recurrent respiratory tract infection (42, 4.48 %). Among 502 controlled studies, the majority compared SAHP alone with different controls (16 categories, 275 comparisons). The most commonly used controls were western medicine, placebo, traditional Chinese medicine, no treatment and non-pharmaceutical traditional Chinese therapies. Composite outcome measures were the most frequently reported outcome (512, 69.19 %).ConclusionA substantial amount of research on SAHP has been published in China and which predominantly focuses on respiratory conditions. The findings from this study can be used to inform further research by highlighting areas of greatest impact for SAHP.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12906-015-0905-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.