Crosstalk between nano/micro particulate technologies and Chinese medicine: a bibliometric analysis.

Background: Chinese medicine is widely applied in Asian and Western countries for its outstanding therapeutic effect, but there are still unsolved problems such as unclear active ingredients and pharmacological effects. The application of nano/microparticle technology in Chinese medicine may become a promising strategy to solve this problem in the near future (provided that more efforts are made to in-depth exploration). In this work, a comprehensive analysis of the field was carried out from a bibliometrics perspective, and further the publishing trends and research hotspots were figured out. Methods: The articles or reviews from 2000 to 2020 were retrieved in the database of Web of Science Core Collection. The documents were processed by Clarivate Analytic, Visualization of Similarities viewer, Statistical Analysis Toolkit for Informetrics and bibliometric online platform, and the data were visualized. Finally, a bibliometric summary, citation analysis results and research trends were described. Results: A bibliometric analysis of 773 articles of interest showed that research in this field had continued to grow in recent years, with a high degree of interdisciplinary integration. Secondly, this field attached great importance to the quantitative analysis of Chinese medicine combined with nano/micro particle technology. Chinese medicine, nanoparticles and liposomes were the most accessed keywords. China was the main contributing country, and the top-10 contributing organizations were all located in China. Co-authorship was a common phenomenon in this field. Conclusion: The published literature on the application of nano/micro particle technology in Chinese medicine was summarized. The results suggested that bibliometric analysis could predict possible directions for future research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]