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Evolving importance of anticancer research using herbal medicine: a scientometric analysis

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Abstract

Phytocompounds and herbal extracts have been utilized in Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani medicine since thousands of years for treatment of various ailments. Success behind herbal medicine strongly suggests the interaction between bio-active phytocompounds with crucial biochemical pathways in a human body without causing adverse effects. The increasing incidence of diseases like cancer instigated the scientific world to focus intently on their pathophysiology and prevention, leading to accelerated research activity in past three decades. This study aims at understanding the evolving global importance of herbal medicine and quality of research against various cancers through scientometric analyses by studying the output from research publications, followed by the contribution from various countries, research institutes, authors, scientific journals and areas of research. To visualize the research structure and dynamics, more than 5000 publications with Science Citation Index that appeared from 1984 to 2013 have been studied and compared for a trend in its growth of publication along with the contributions from various bibliometric parameters stated above. After using the ‘Web of Science’ database it became well evident that the concerned bibliometric parameters contributed substantially in projecting the overall scientific output in the field of herbal anticancer research as reflected from the citation analysis and h-index data. It has been observed that the number of publications increased with compound annual growth rate of 10.39% during the studied periods. Evolving trend of the research topics was visualised by drawing the keyword co-occurrence map in this field.

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Acknowledgements

Tapasree Basu and Ajoy Mallik are grateful to the University Grant Commission, Government of India for providing fellowship to pursue research. All the authors are thankful to Dr. Abhishek Das for performing an extensive editing of the manuscript.

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  1. Ajoy Mallik

    Present address: Department of Zoology, Dinabandhu Mahavidyalaya, Bongaon, North 24 Parganas, West Bengal, 743235, India

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  1. Division of Molecular Medicine, Bose Institute, P-1/12 CIT Scheme VII M, Kolkata, 700054, India

    Tapasree Basu, Ajoy Mallik & Nripendranath Mandal

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  1. Tapasree Basu
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Correspondence to Nripendranath Mandal.

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Tapasree Basu and Ajoy Mallik have contributed equally to this work.

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Basu, T., Mallik, A. & Mandal, N. Evolving importance of anticancer research using herbal medicine: a scientometric analysis. Scientometrics 110, 1375–1396 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2223-8

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