Electroacupuncture for Pain Therapy: A Bibliometric Analysis and Content Review Update for 1 Decade (2013-2022)

Each year, pain imposes significant economic and social burdens, such as increased physician visits, analgesic use, and decreased productivity. Electroacupuncture (EA) was first used in China and is a potential addition to existing pain-relief approaches. Globally and exponentially, the number of fundamental and clinical studies on EA has increased over the past decade. Most bibliometric studies in this area focus on acupuncture therapy. A prevalent quantitative and qualitative approach, bibliometric analysis scrutinizes published scholarly articles and can be used to assess advancements in specific research domains. Yet, to the best of the current authors' knowledge, no specific bibliometric analysis of EA as a pain therapy has yet been conducted.

Article data were taken from the Scopus^® database with the key words electroacupuncture or electro-acupuncture or electric acupuncture and pain. The timeframe was set between 2013 and 2022 in all forms, regardless of language barriers, resulting in a total of 1592 documents. The results of the data search were then analyzed with bibliometrics and VOSviewer.

This study showed the rapid growth in the study of EA in the last decade. Additionally, Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine is a major journal that frequently publishes articles on EA.

Despite China's substantial publication output on EA, international collaboration is limited, particularly among nations other than the United States and China.