The ethnopharmacological literature: An analysis of the scientific landscape

The research into bioactive natural products originating from medicinal plants, fungi and other organisms has a long history, accumulating abundant and diverse publications. However no quantitative literature analysis has been conducted so far.

Here we analyze the bibliometric data of ethnopharmacology literature and relate the semantic content to the publication and citation data so that the major research themes, contributors, and journals of different time periods could be identified and evaluated.

Web of Science (WoS) was searched to identify relevant publications. The Analyze function of WoS and bibliometric software (VOSviewer) were utilized to perform the analyses.

Until the end of November 2018, 59,576 publications -linked to 'ethnopharmacology' indexed by WoS, published since 1958 in more than 5600 journals, and contributed by over 20,600 institutions located in more than 200 countries/regions, were identified. The papers were published under four dominating WoS categories, namely pharmacology/pharmacy (34.4%), plant sciences (28.6%), medicinal chemistry (25.3%), and integrative complementary medicine (20.6%). India (14.6%) and China (13.2%) were dominating the publication space. The United States and Brazil also had more than 8.0% contribution each. The rest of the top ten countries/regions were mainly from Asia. There were around ten-fold more original articles (84.6%) than reviews (8.4%).

Ethnopharmacological research has a consistent focus on food and plant sciences, (bio)chemistry, complementary medicine and pharmacology, with a more limited scientific acceptance in the socio-cultural sciences. Dynamic global contributions have been shifting from developed countries to economically and scientifically emerging countries in Asia, South America and the Middle East. Research on recording medicinal plant species used by traditional medicine continues, but the evaluation of specific properties or treatment effects of extracts and compounds has increased enormously. Moreover increasing attention is paid to some widely distributed natural products, such as curcumin, quercetin, and rutin.