Active research fields of acupuncture research: a document co-citation clustering analysis of acupuncture literature

This study aims to gain an overview of the active fields of acupuncture research in the last 5 to 10 years and before that.

Document co-citation clustering analysis method was used in this article. ISI web of knowledge-SCI-EXPANDED was used to retrieve the cited references of the documents published under the topic "acupuncture." In order to identify the highly frequently cited articles, the cited references were ranked by occurrence frequency; the frequent threshold value of highly frequently cited articles was set at 20, and their cumulative frequency percentage was nearly 10%. In order to identify the correlation between these highly frequently cited articles, a references co-occurrence matrix was constructed and then transformed into a correlation matrix for co-citation cluster analysis with SPSS 11.5 (SPSS Inc, Chicago, Illinois).

Between 2006 and 2008, 985 original articles involving acupuncture were published, and their nearly 20000 references were downloaded. Forty-one frequently cited references ranging from 1976 to 2005 were identified, and a 41x41 co-citation matrix was acquired. The active fields of acupuncture research were identified after co-citation cluster analysis.

The active fields in the last 5 to 10 years and previously could be identified as follows. (1) Clinical research on acupuncture; (a) studies on the safety of acupuncture; (b) the quest for the "placebo" needle and assessment of the placebo effect; (c) assessment of the efficacy of acupuncture for chronic back pain, osteoarthritis of the knee, and chronic headache. (2) Usage of acupuncture: (a) surveys on the trends of acupuncture use; (b) ethical guidelines of acupuncture experiments and quality assessment. (3) Experimental research on acupuncture mechanism: (a) the neurochemical basis of acupuncture analgesia and (b) evaluation of the effects of acupuncture using functional magnetic resonance imaging.