1. Conclusions  Of the total, 82% were published as articles, 92% were written in English.  China dominated the most publications followed by Japan and Taiwan.  The American Journal of Chinese Medicine published most of the articles.  The yearly publications sustained a constant growth rate in the period from 1991 to 2004.  The majority of traditional Chinese medicine research was carried out in Far East Asia countries. Trends in Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Scientometric Study John Y.S. Cheng 1, Wen-Ta Chiu 1, I-Hsin Lin 2, Yu-Ting Feng 2, Jia-Wei Lin 1 and Yuh-Shan Ho 3 1 Department of Neurosurgery, Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan 2 School of Public Health, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan 3 Bibliometric Centre, Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan Introduction Chinese medicine was not part of the long history of China but also in the Far East Asia. As world has pushed toward the western and known as the more scientific based medicine and practice, a bibliometric analysis was performed to evaluate the quantitative performance of traditional Chinese medicine research activity in the world. This study explored a bibliometric analysis of all traditional Chinese medicine publications in the Science Citation Index (SCI), Philadelphia, PA, USA. A systematic search was performed using the SCI for publications from 1991 to 2004. SP, single country publications CP, international collaboration publications P, Total publications Journal articles were the most frequent document type comprising 82% of the total production, followed distantly by reviews (143; 6.8%). Meeting abstracts (80; 3.8%), letters (48; 2.3%), notes (35; 1.7%), editorial materials (34; 1.6%), Book Reviews (13, 0.62%), news items (10; 0.47%), Reprints (6, 0.28%), corrections (3; 0.14%), and addition corrections (1; 0.47) showed lesser prevalent than articles and reviews. The ten most used author keywords were traditional Chinese medicine (137, 2.4%), Chinese medicine (96, 1.7%), acupuncture (68,.2%), apoptosis (43, 0.76%), pharmaceutical analysis (29, 0.51%), HPLC (26, 0.46%), Chinese medicinal herbs (18, 0.32%), antioxidant (17, 0.30%), capillary electrophoresis (14, 0.25%), and Chinese herbal medicine (12, 0.21%). American Journal of Chinese Medicine published the most traditional Chinese medicine articles (90; 5.2%), followed by Biological & Pharmaceutical Bulletin (67; 3.9%), American Journal of Acupuncture (47; 2.7%), Life Sciences (37; 2.7%), Journal of Chromatography A (46; 2.6%), Journal of Ethnopharmacology (39, 2.2%), Chinese Journal of Analytical Chemistry (35, 2.0%), Spectroscopy and Spectral Analysis (33, 1.9%), Phytotherapy Research (31, 1.8%) and Planta Medica (27, 1.6%). Figure 1. Annual publication output Table 1. Publication activity of top ten countries Table 2. The ten most productive corresponding institutesMethods The 2004 edition of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), lists 5968 journals in the Science Citation Index (SCI). Documents used in this study were based on the database of the SCI subscribed from the ISI Web of Science, Philadelphia, PA, USA. “Chinese medic*” were used as keywords to search titles, abstracts, or keywords. It may include Chinese medicine, Chinese medication, Chinese medical, Chinese medications, Chinese medicaments, Chinese medicated, Chinese medicinal, and Chinese medicines. Articles, reviews, meeting abstracts, letters, notes, editorial materials, book reviews, news items, reprints, corrections, and addition corrections were obtained from the results of the search for document types. Articles would have further analysis in this study.Results