1. Assessing Homeopathy Research Productivity
An-Ming Wang1*, Shih-Kai Lin1, Hsiang-Chung Liu1, Yee-Shuan Lee2 and Yuh-Shan Ho1#
1School of Public Health, Taipei Medical University
2Bibliometric Centre, Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital
Introduction
Alternative or complementary medicine is on the rise around the world. The basic notions of alternative medicine are different from those of current scientific medicine. Homeopathy, derived from Greek words homeo (similar) and pathos (suffering), is one of the often used alternative medical systems in the world. It is based on three principles: like cures like, minimal dose and single remedy (The Burton Goldberg Group, 1993). In another word, cures are given by similar characteristics with minimal dosage of a single substance. It was first described by Samuel Hahnemann ( ) who was a physician, chemist, linguist, historian of medicine and scientific revolutionary. In this study, a quantitative analysis was done on homeopathy related publications during the time span of 1991 to 2002.
Methodology
The data for this study were based on Science Citation Index (SCI) database on the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A. “Homeopathy or Homeopathic” were used as the keywords to search as a part of the title, abstract or keyword.
Results and Discussion
The number of papers published by different countries in the period and their percentage share is shown in Table 1. The U.K. is the leader, followed by Germany, the U.S.A., France, India, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands and Italy. The low productivity of Japan is somewhat unexpected as it is one of the seven major industrial countries (G7). Countries with Relative Citation Rate (RCR) value higher than 1 indicated they had more impact than the average of this field. Figure 1 clearly showed the citation per publication (CPP) and the production trend.
A total of 1085 papers were published in 333 SCI indexed journals from 37 countries during the time span from 1991 to 2002 concerning homeopathy (Figure 1). Over 74% of the papers were published in English with Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian and Spanish accounted for the remaining share. UK has dominated the production share and other top 10 counties were list in Table % of the papers were in the form of articles. This distribution was much lower that other research field.
Table 1. Publication output, citation frequency, CPP and RCR of top 10 publishing countries
P: Publication, C: Times cited, CPP: citation per publication, RCR: Relative citation rate
Publication and CPP of various document types
Figure 1. Annual publication output and CPP
Publication output and CPP of various number of authors
Publication and citation of various page counts
Conclusion
The yearly production has grown twice more than a decade ago where 50% were single-authored.
UK, USA and Germany have produced more than 50% of total output where European countries have also contributed 50% of the total share.
English remain the dominant language, but it only composed 74% where German contributed 20% and remaining were distributed among 8 European languages.
“Eisenberg, D.M., Davis, R.B., Ettner, S.L., Appel, S., Wilkey, S., van Rompay, M. and Kessler, R.C. (1998), Trends in alternative medicine use in the United States, Results of a follow-up national survey. JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association, 280 (18), ” is the most cited paper with 824 times cited.
References
The Burton Goldberg Group (1993), Alternative Medicine, The Definitive Guide, Future Medicine Publishing, Washington, USA.