Abstract

Introduction: Persian medicine (PM) is one of the oldest branches of medicine in the world. The purpose of this research was to analyze published articles about PM in the PubMed indexed journals.

Methods: Articles indexed in the PubMed database (2015-2019) were searched for keywords “Iranian traditional medicine”, “Iranian medicine”, “Persian traditional medicine” and “Persian medicine”. The data were evaluated for subject relevance and categorized, based on the journal metrics. Finally, all the data were analyzed and reported.

Results: From the 3,000 records, 359 PM related articles were extracted. The most abundant number of published articles was in the year 2016, followed by a downward trend. The mean citation per article was 6.6. The largest portion of published articles belonged to the Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences. Among the top ten journals, the highest impact factor was 3.414 for the Journal of Ethnopharmacology. Most of the journals were in the Q1 category according to Cite score Quartile. The highest impact factor (IF) was 7.995 for the JAMA Dermatology Journal and the average IF of all Journals was 1.39. The highest Citescore among all the journals was 5.27 and the highest journal h-Index was 170 for the Journal of Ethnopharmacology.

Conclusion: The total number of published PM articles over the past five years, despite a downtrend in 2016, has increased compared to previous years.

Keywords: Research trends, Persian medicine, Persian traditional medicine, Iranian medicine, Iranian traditional medicine, PubMed.

Graphical Abstract