Status and Impact of Acupuncture Research: A Bibliometric Analysis of Global and Brazilian Scientific Output from 2000 to 2014.

Objective: This bibliometric study was designed to evaluate the scientific output of Brazilian acupuncture publications and compare that output to the global trends in the same area. Methods: The analyzed data were retrieved from the online version of Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) database and covered the period from 2000 to 2014. The documents were searched by using the topic filter to find acupuncture-related documents (ARDs) and the title filter for acupuncture-specific documents (ASDs). The analyzed categories included number of publications, type of documents, number of citations, universities/ institutions, research areas, and journals. Results: A total of 9301 ARDs and 5974 ASDs were published in the past 15 years worldwide. The global average number of citations per document was 10.61 for ARDs and 9.24 for ASDs. Brazil has published 252 ARDs and 169 ASDs, which corresponds to the tenth and ninth positions on the global correspondent rankings. The United States is the most productive country, with 2503 ARD publications, followed by China with 2143 and South Korea with 925. Norway is in the first position for the ARD citation rank, with 25.77 citations per document; Switzerland is in the first position for the ASD citation rank, with 26.66. Brazil has 4.19 citations per document, which corresponds to the 20th position in the ASD citation rankings. Evidence-Based Complementary Medicine, Acupuncture in Medicine, and The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine are the leading journals in terms of numbers of ARDs and ASDs in Brazil and globally. Conclusion: The bibliometric analysis of the SCI-E database shows that global numbers of ARDs and ASDs and citations have constantly increased from 2000 to 2014. Brazil is among the top 10 most productive countries in the world in terms of number of acupuncture publications. However, the number of citations of Brazilian documents is below the global average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]