https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1637-1178
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Abstract
Background
Acupuncture has been widely used to relieve myofascial pain syndromes (MPS) in many countries. However, the bibliometric analysis of the global application of acupuncture for MPS remains unknown.
Purpose
The present study aims to evaluate the research trends and hot spots of acupuncture for MPS.
Methods
Literatures about acupuncture for MPS from 2000 to 2022 were obtained from the Web of Science. CiteSpace (6.1.R3) was used to analyze the number of publications, countries, institutions, authors, cited journals, cited authors, cited references and keywords.
Results
A total of 403 records were included in the final analysis. The total number of publications increased but with some fluctuations. The Pain was the most cited journals. The most productive country and institution were USA, and China Medicine University, respectively. Liwei Chou was the most prolific author, and Simons DG ranked first in the cited author. In the ranking of frequency and centrality in cited references, the first article was published by Tough EA and Simons DG, respectively. The keyword of “acupuncture” ranked first in frequency, “double blind” ranked first in centrality. “Meta-analysis” was the keyword with the strongest citation burst. There were three hot topics in this field, including “the clinical feature of MPS”, “measure of intervention” and “research method”. The mechanism of acupuncture on MPS was one of the main research directions.
Conclusion
This study reveals that acupuncture was more and more acceptable, while the cooperation between different countries, institutions and authors should be strengthened. The researches of therapeutic effect and mechanism were the main research directions. More high-quality clinical trials are needed to confirm the therapeutic effect of acupuncture for MPS, and more studies to unify the acupuncture parameters such as frequency, duration, and intensity. More basic studies are needed to elucidate the precise mechanism of acupuncture for MPS.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to express their appreciation to Professor Chaomei Chen for inventing the CiteSpace software and making it free to use. This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation Project of China (82074518), Zhejiang Traditional Chinese Medicine Science and Technology Project (2022ZQ048) and Zhejiang Chinese Medical University Scientific Research Project (2021JKJNTZ031B). Fengyan Lu and Peizhong Ren are the co-first authors.
Disclosure
The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.