Application of Acupuncture for Shoulder Pain Over the Past 22 Years: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Purpose

Acupuncture is widely used to relieve shoulder pain. A survey was conducted in order to recognize hotspots and frontiers of acupuncture for shoulder pain from the year 2000–2022.

Methods

The Web of Science Core Collection was used to collect literature related to acupuncture therapy for shoulder pain, which spanned January 2000 to August 2022. The number of publications yearly, countries/institutions, journals, and keywords was analyzed and visualized in shoulder pain with acupuncture therapy by CiteSpace v.5.7.R5.

Results

We totally analyzed 214 articles that met the inclusion criteria. The overall trend of publication volume continues to increase. The most productive authors in the field were César Fernández las Peñas and José L Arias-Buría, and the most influential author was Green S. Kyung Hee University and the People’s Republic of China had the highest volume of publications, respectively. The most influential journal is Pain with high citation and impact factor. The hot keywords were “acupuncture”, “shoulder pain”, “dry needling”, “randomized trial”, and “injection”. The research frontier in acupuncture for treating chronic shoulder pain was mainly “mechanism”.

Conclusion

Over the last 22 years, the findings of this bibliometric analysis have provided research trends and frontiers in clinical research on acupuncture therapy for patients with shoulder pain, which identifying hot topics and exploring new directions for the future may be helpful to researchers. Studying mechanisms underlying acupuncture therapy for shoulder pain remains a focus of future research.

Keywords:

• acupuncture
• shoulder pain
• bibliometric analysis
• CiteSpace

Disclosure

The authors declared there are no interest conflicts to the publication of this study.

Additional information

Funding

A grant of 2020A1515011421, from the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province provided the study.