Bibliometric Analysis of Herbal Medicine Publications, 1991 to 2004 Chia-Ku Lin1, Chia-Chun Chen2, Chun-Nan Chen3 and Yuh-Shan Ho4 1School of Public Health, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan 2Department of Internal Medicine, Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan 3Department of Gastroenterology, Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan 4Bibliometric Centre, Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan Introduction Traditional herbal medicines have been widely used in the Eastern countries such as Korea, China, and Japan for thousand of years. In the Western countries, it is primarily used as dietary supplements to relive and treat many diseases. By applying advanced scientific technology, new drugs can be generated from herbal medicines where sales of herbal medicine have increased dramatically over the past years. Such perspectives and example of drug development were undergoing in China, Japan, the US, and some other countries. The purpose of this study was to asses the publication pattern of herbal medicine research performance based on the 2432 papers published in Science Citation Index (SCI) indexed periodicals between 1991 and 2004. These documents were analyzed and evaluated according to publication and to determine the quantitative characteristics of herbal medicine research. Methods Documents used in this study were based on the databases of the SCI which were accessed from the ISI Web of Science, Philadelphia, PA, USA. “Herbal medic*” were used as keywords to search titles, abstracts, or keywords. It may include herbal medicine, herbal medicines, herbal medicinal, herbal medicinals, herbal medications, herbal medication, herbal medicaments, and herbal medical. Results Figure 1. Cumulative number of publications by year PY: Publication year P: Number of articles PG: Page count AU: Number of authors J: Number of journals Table 3. Major characteristics of the herbal medicine research Table 1. Most 10 publishing countries Figure 2. Distribution of document type Table 2. Publication of various regions P: Number of articles; SP: Single country; ublications; CP: International collaboration publications; CN: No. of country Conclusions Logarithmic and exponential relations between yearly cumulative number of publications and the year were obtained for the 2 periods from 1991 to 1996 and 1996 to 2004. The logarithmic relation shows that herbal medicine research was a constant growth rate on publications in the early 90’s. The exponential relation indicates that the yearly articles sustain constantly growth rate on publications after 1996. English remains the dominant languages. The top 3 ranking countries of publication were Japan, the US, and China. The Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University in Japan had the highest frequency as corresponding institute. The most-frequently cited article was published in the JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association which is the second highest impact factor journal in the category of general & internal medicine.