[Top-cited academic articles in acupuncture and moxibustion research]

To identify the 100 top-cited articles published in journals dedicated to acupuncture & moxibustion research and analyze their characteristics so as to explore its academic state.

All the articles were collected from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI, January 1, 1943 to December 25, 2016), Web of Science (January 1, 1950 to December 25, 2016), WANFANG Database (January 1, 1998 to December 25, 2016). The top-cited articles were selected and analyzed with regard to publication year, number of citations, journals, authors, country or region, institution, title, type and subject.

One hundred and two articles were included, 43 Chinese articles and 59 English articles, cited between 146 and 505 times, and the average number of citation was 222. Of the 10 articles cited in the top 10, China and the United States had 4 articles respectively. These articles appeared in 44 journals, 24 articles in Chinese Acupuncture & Moxibustion, followed by 8 articles in Pain. All the articles belonged to 9 countries and regions, 47 articles from mainland China and 21 articles from the United State. Of the 14 institutes whose article number ranked at top 10, Tianjing University of TCM had 8 articles. The first authors published most papers were professor HAN Jisheng and Cherkin DC, each of whom had 4 articles. All the articles were categorized into basic science article (n=27), clinical research (n=33) and literature study (n=42). The main topics were pain diseases and brain impairment.

This analysis of high cited articles reveals academic trends and directions of acupuncture and moxibustion. Acupuncture and moxibustion are more and more recognized by mainstream medicine in the world, but the academic dominance of China has been increasingly challenged by the United States, Germany and so on.