Scientometric analysis of medicinal leech therapy

Hirudotherapy, also known as medicinal leech therapy, has been used to treat a wide range of disorders for thousands of years since Ancient Egypt. Leech therapy is also mentioned as a minimal invasive technique called Jalaukavacharana in the Sushruta Samhita, an ancient Sanskrit text of Ayurvedic medicine. Although hirudotherapy has become a popular component of complementary medicine in the last decade, scientometric studies investigating the articles published in this field, do not exist.

In this study, we aimed to perform a detailed scientometric analysis of hirudotherapy literature.

We collected data by using four databases provided by Web of Science using the keywords "hirudotherapy", "leech therapy", "medicinal leech" and "medicinal leech therapy".

A total of 834 articles were found of which 89.8% were original articles. USA was the leading country with 280 publications, followed by UK, Germany and France (128, 101 and 41 items, respectively). The most productive countries regarding hirudotherapy were the UK (1.93), Slovenia (1.44), and Israel (1.32). The peak publication year for hirudotherapy literature was 2011 with 41 papers.

To the best of our knowledge, our study was the first bibliometric and scientometric analysis in this field and we believe that multicenter studies and further searches from developing and least-developed countries are needed in hirudotherapy literature.