Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Dermatology: A Scientometric Literature Review

Scientific literature lacks a scientometric analysis of traditional, complementary and alternative medicine (TCAM) for dermatology. The aim of this study is to investigate the associations between TCAM and dermatology as seen in academic literature published between 1975 and 2018.

All materials analyzed in this study were collected from 3 major academic databases, namely Web of Science, PubMed and Scopus, and all documents assessed were published between 1975 and 2018. A keyword string of "dermatology" AND ("complementary medicine" OR "alternative medicine" OR "traditional medicine" OR "integrative medicine") was used to search the databases.

A total of 316 articles were retrieved from Web of Science, 388 from Scopus and 389 from PubMed. Original articles represented 92.208% of all literature found. In addition, the USA had the highest number of publications with 61 documents, followed by the UK, China and Germany, while only three developing countries were represented in the group of most productive countries. Notably, low income countries were not represented in the list of countries with the highest volume of publications. Of all the institutions in the most represented countries, the University of Oxford was found to be the most productive. The most used keywords in the literature were noted to be "dermatology", "alternative medicine", "traditional medicine" and "psoriasis".

In view of the underrepresentation of low income developing countries in the productive group, it is suggested that researchers from these countries should be supported to produce novel TCAM studies in dermatology.