Production Trends, Collaboration, and Main Topics of the Integrative and Complementary Oncology Research Area: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Background: The prevalence of cancer has increased over time worldwide. Nevertheless, the number of deaths has been reduced during the past 2 decades. Thus, one-third of the cancer patients are users of complementary and alternative therapies, looking for other types of interventions. The main aim of the present study is to understand the current status of the research in integrative and complementary oncology. Three different aspects were analyzed: production trends, country collaboration, and leading research topics. Methods: The dataset was obtained from the documents indexed under the Integrative and Complementary Medicine category of the Web of Science database from 1976 to 2017. VOSviewer and SciMAT software were employed to perform the bibliometric analysis. Results: The Journal of Ethnopharmacology , China Medical University and the People’s Republic of China are the leading producers in the field. Regarding the collaboration, the United States and China present a close connection. The scientific community is focused on the following topics: apoptosis, breast cancer, oxidative stress, chemotherapy, and nuclear factor-Kappa-B (NF-Kappa-B). Conclusions: The present article shows potentially important information that allows understanding of the past, present, and future of research in integrative and complementary oncology. It is a useful evidence-based framework on which to base future research actions and academic directions.

Mapping the Link between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Human Resource Management (HRM): How Is This Relationship Measured?

“…This paper may have excluded research published outside of WoS journals, although the fact that WoS represents the world's leading academic database in social science [142] adds value to this research. Moreover, the document selection was grounded on certain WoS categories, and some researches could be included in other categories [143]. In addition, some authors do not mention all the relevant keywords (in fact, the oldest documents do not include keywords), or there may be some bias in the keywords to use.…”

Mapping the Knowledge Domain of Smart-City Research: A Bibliometric and Scientometric Analysis

“…VOSviewer, developed by van Eck and Waltman [26], has many common bibliometric functions, including bibliographic coupling, co-authorship, co-occurrence, and co-citation analysis. The software has been widely used in scientometric analysis in many domains: Library and information science [29], medicine [30,31], computer science [32], biology [33], and education [34]. CiteSpace, developed by Chen [27], as a tool for producing knowledge maps, can identify and display new trends and developments in a subject area through analysis of the literature, and can detect the research progress, current research frontiers, and knowledge bases of such an area.…”

Comparative Analysis of Web of Science and Scopus on the Energy Efficiency and Climate Impact of Buildings

“…Correlations between authors and keywords were analyzed with the bibliometric analysis software VOSviewer [29]. VOSviewer is a freely available software for generating bibliometric maps of scientific fields, showing its versatility (i.e., food chemistry [30], artificial intelligence [31], health [32], social sciences [33], and neuroscience [34]). VOSviewer implements the visualization of similarities mapping technique [35], where networks are drawn in which the distances between nodes show the levels of closeness between them.…”