A bibliometric study of scientific literature on the dietary therapies for epilepsy in Scopus.

OBJECTIVES

The aim of this study was to provide a descriptive overview of the impact and production of literature on dietary therapies for epilepsy and perform a citation analysis of the related research articles.

METHODS

We searched for 'ketogenic OR low-glycemic OR medium chain OR modified Atkins in TITLE AND epilep*' in Title/Abstract/Keyword in Scopus database.

RESULTS

A total of 661 references were retrieved, 80% had been published after 2000s, 87% were published in English, and 39% of the publications were published in nine journals. The majority (76.3%) of research articles describe the clinical application of the dietary therapies regarding the classical ketogenic diet (80%), followed by the modified Atkins diet (11.5%), medium chain triglyceride diet (6.4%), and low glycemic index treatment (2.0%); the remaining are basic science studies on the mechanisms of action. The citation analysis revealed that the latter have the highest percentage variation in citation per publication across the years. Concerning the article cohorts, the greatest number of citations per publication was in 1998.

DISCUSSION

The overview of the literature on the dietary therapy of epilepsy evidences a growing interest in the field with a striking prevalence of clinical over basic science studies. The most cited clinical studies have validated the efficacy of the dietary therapies; the few studies on the mechanisms of action received a great number of citations. Bibliometric analysis measuring the trends and the impact of the scientific literature would help researchers to a best knowledge of this specific topic.