Current Research Trends in Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula: A Bibliometric Review from 2000 to 2016

Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula (TCMF) study has been recognized widely by medical scientists around the world. However, few researchers have analyzed and summarized the rapid growth of academic articles of TCMF published in English. The primary aim of this work was to assess the outcome of these research outputs in the TCMF field from 2000 to 2016 and to evaluate the situation and tendency.

Research datasets were acquired from the Web of Science database, which includes all academic articles published from 2000 to 2016; articles were tracked by the keywords "Traditional Chinese Medicine", "Traditional Chinese Medicine Formula", and "Chinese herb formula". Moreover, visualization software CiteSpace V was used to analyze and generate visualization knowledge maps.

In total, 26,917 articles appeared in the Web of Science database, and only 2,621 publications met requirement based on reading the abstract or full text. The annual publications total, list of journals, research interests, list of medicine names, disease types, and the top 20 cited articles were given in this research paper. In addition, we compared the research of Japan and Korea TCMF, in the appendix.

This review demonstrates that increasingly more researchers have interest in the TCMF and TCMF has great significant advantages over other areas of focus. However, these publications were published rarely in top academic journals and most best-quality papers have bias toward medical analysis rather than pharmacology. To make a breakthrough in TCMF field, further investigation is required to place emphasis on the deepening study of the mechanism of related TCMF.