Scientometric Analysis of Scientific Publications on Persian Medicine Indexed in the Web of Science Database

Persian medicine (PM), also known as Iranian traditional medicine, is a collection of ancient experience, knowledge and skills that has been long practiced by Iranian experts for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Given the importance of assessing scientific outputs and the rising popularity of traditional medicine, such as PM, we aimed to perform scientometric analysis and draw a scientific map of PM-related publications to present a research perspective in this field of science. This descriptive and analytical study was carried out with a scientometric approach on all PM-related scientific publications in the Web of Science (WoS) database until November 2018. The VOSviewer software was used for drawing the scientific maps. The results showed that until 18 November 2018, 1717 documents related to the field of PM have been indexed in the Web of Science. Average citation rate in the field of PM was 8.11 citations per document. H-index of these documents was 49. The amount of scientific productions in the field of PM has increased dramatically since 2013 (growth rate= 61.06%). Journal of Ethnopharmacology, which is specifically dedicated to integrative and complementary medicine, has published the greatest number of PM documents (4.834 %). Moreover, 92.02 Percent of the authors of the retrieved articles were from Iran. Kamalinejad M. with 63 documents was the most prolific author in the field of PM, and the Tehran University of Medical Sciences with 336 articles contributed the most to publication of papers on this field. Based on the findings, PM is not well known enough among international researchers, and Iranian researchers and organizations contribute the most to publication of papers on this field of science. Collaborative writing, international co-authorship and participation in international conferences and meetings could fill this gap and boost popularity of this field of science worldwide