A Bibliometric Analysis of Acupuncture Therapy in the Treatment of Primary Dysmenorrhea from 2001 to 2021

BACKGROUND: Acupuncture therapy has already extensively used in many countries around the world to treat primary dysmenorrhea. But there is no bibliometric analysis on this aspect. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the research trends of acupuncture therapy in the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea through literature research from 2001 to 2021 by using Citespace 6.1.R1(64-bit) Basic. METHODS: Relevant literature is extracted from the Web of Science database. CiteSpace conducts cooperative network analysis on the information of authors, countries and institutions, co-occurrence network analysis on keywords, and co-citation analysis on cited journals, cited authors and cited references. RESULTS: A total of 189 publications were extracted from 2001 to 2021. The total numbers of publication have steadily increased over the past two decades, and we have identified the most active countries, institutions, journals and authors in the field of acupuncture for primary dysmenorrhea. The EVID-BASED COMPL ALT was the most productive journal, and the COCHRANE DB SYST REV with the highest IF. The first in the frequency and centrality is the journal of AM J OBSTET GYNECOL. The most productive country and institution are China and Beijing University Chinese Medicine. YANG J was the most prolific author and CHEN H had the highest citation counts. The centrality of cite references ranked the first conducted by Burnett M. The keyword of “primary dysmenorrhea” ranked first for research developments with the highest frequency. CONCLUSION: The research results of Metrology in this paper provide the current situation and trend of clinical research on primary dysmenorrhea acupuncture Therapy in recent twenty-one years, which is helpful for researchers to identify the hot spots in this field and explore new directions of future research.