Koo Malcolm
Department of Medical Research, Dalin Tzu Chi Hospital, Buddhist Tzu Chi Medical Foundation, 2 Minsheng Road, Dalin, Chiayi, 62247, Taiwan.
Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
BMC Res Notes. 2017 Jan 18;10(1):46. doi: 10.1186/s13104-016-2371-1.
Quantitative data are lacking on the profile of published research in aromatherapy. The objective of the study was to investigate the profile of original and review articles under the topic aromatherapy using bibliometric analysis.
Articles on aromatherapy, published between 1995 and 2014, were retrieved from the Science Citation Index-Expanded database from the Web of Science. The records extracted were analyzed for citation characteristics, including the distribution of publication years, languages, countries or regions, journals, articles, and authors using HistCite 12.03.17. VOSviewer v.1.61 was used to construct bibliometric diagrams.
A total of 549 original and review articles, published in 287 different peer-reviewed journals by 1888 authors, were identified. There was a steady increase in the number of published articles from 1995 to 2014. The majority of the articles was written in English (95.8%) and the United States was the leading country in the total number of published articles (n = 107, 19.5%) Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine published the greatest number of articles on the topic (n = 31, 5.6%). The article that received the greatest number of citations was published in Complementary Therapies in Medicine. Visualization analysis based on co-occurrences of words in the title and abstract revealed three clusters of research topics, including essential oil, intervention, and complementary medicine.
This study provided a systematic overview of productivity and visibility of research work in aromatherapy and the findings could be used for organizing and prioritizing future research efforts in aromatherapy research.
目前缺乏关于芳香疗法已发表研究概况的定量数据。本研究的目的是通过文献计量分析来调查芳香疗法主题下的原创文章和综述文章的概况。
从科学网的科学引文索引扩展数据库中检索1995年至2014年间发表的关于芳香疗法的文章。使用HistCite 12.03.17对提取的记录进行引文特征分析，包括出版年份、语言、国家或地区、期刊、文章和作者的分布情况。使用VOSviewer v.1.61构建文献计量图。
共识别出1888位作者在287种不同的同行评审期刊上发表的549篇原创文章和综述文章。1995年至2014年间发表文章的数量稳步增加。大多数文章是用英语撰写的（95.8%），美国是发表文章总数最多的国家（n = 107，19.5%）。《替代与补充医学杂志》发表的关于该主题的文章数量最多（n = 31，5.6%）。被引用次数最多的文章发表在《补充医学疗法》上。基于标题和摘要中单词共现的可视化分析揭示了三个研究主题集群，包括精油、干预和补充医学。
本研究提供了芳香疗法研究工作的生产力和影响力的系统概述，研究结果可用于组织和确定未来芳香疗法研究工作的优先顺序。
