OPEN ACCESS VOLUME 33, NUMBER 3 PUBLISHED: JUNE 2018 ARTICLE REVIEWREVIEW ARTICLE
Characteristics of 218 Recent Reviews on Natural Health Products in Integrative Cancer Care: A Bibliometric Analysis of Trends in the Human Research Literature
Author(s): Elise Cogo, ND, MSc, MLIS1; Peter Papadogianis, MSc, ND1 1. Patterson Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine 1255 Sheppard Avenue East, Toronto, ON. Canada M2K 1E2. Correspondence: ecogo@ccnm.edu
Abstract. 218 systematic or comprehensive reviews on natural health products (NHPs) in integrative oncology, which were published from 2010-2017 in English, were identified from a MEDLINE database search (July 3, 2017) based on the PubMed Dietary Supplements Subset search filter after screening over 1950 records for eligibility. Included reviews had to synthesize human studies that used a control group (experimental or observational). These reviews were used to create ‘positive-focused’ evidence maps as part of an exploratory project to guide the future research agenda at the Patterson Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine (and the evidence maps are being published in four related reports). To our knowledge, this article reports the first bibliometric analysis on this topic in order to present trends and characteristics of the human research literature in these 218 systematic or comprehensive reviews on NHPs in integrative cancer care. Anne O’Tate, a free web-based tool developed by the Arrowsmith project that summarizes PubMed search results (available at http://arrowsmith.psych.uic.edu), was used to analyze all authors and journals of the included reviews. Publication dates, countries, and NHP categories included (i.e., Nutraceuticals, Botanical and Fungi preparations, and Traditional Chinese and Asian Medicine formulations) are also presented.
Bibliometric Analysis The field of integrative oncology is very broad and diverse with an increasing number of human studies being published on a variety of natural health products (NHPs), cancer types, conventional treatment contexts, etc. Bibliometric analyses enable high-level overviews of the research literature landscape on an extensive topic and can be used to identify trends and characteristics of publications. Sever-
al types of bibliometric analyses have been conducted on various aspects of natural health products (NHPs) in the past decade or so (Du, & Tang, 2014; Fu, 2010; Hung, & Ernst, 2010; Kim, Kim, Lee, Kim, Wieland, & Shin, 2014; Koo, 2017; Leung, Chan, & Song, 2006; Li, Cui, & Cui, 2009; Li, Tao, Zhou, & Ling, 2011; Wieland, Manheimer, Sampson, Barnabas, Bouter, Cho, & et al., 2013; Zyoud, Al-Jabi, & Sweileh, 2015). To our knowledge, a bibliometric analysis of systematic reviews of human controlled studies on the use
© 2018 International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine ISSN 0317-0209
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