Abstract

The aim of the study was to analyze recent trends of experimental studies regarding to acupuncture and moxibustion (AM) through reviewing the 492 papers in the PubMed database in order to help researchers from overlapping study on the same theme and to spur them to investigate experimental studies on AM with understanding the current flow of that. For the analysis, we include papers in which abstract was written in English. First, we performed quantitative analysis of the experimental studies using whole of the first filtrated 492 papers. From this analysis, we could obtain the followings: 'Trends of study in the most frequently appeared journals and leading authors in experimental study of AM'. 'The number of papers and name of journals by leading authors in experimental study of AM'. 'Trends of Korean papers in the most frequently appeared journals and Korean leading authors in experimental study of AM", 'Classification of experimental studies related to acupuncture and moxibustion according to intervention methods or individual country' and 'Assortment of experimental studies related to acupuncture and moxibustion in terms of intervention methods on leading countries'. Second, we collected 72 papers considering impact factor of the journal and influential effect of the papers' result for qualitative analysis, and we divided the papers into pain related one or not, because the effect of AM on pain is major subject of AM study. The results showed that experimental studies regarding to AM still has several weakness such as limited usage of acupuncture points and inclined application of electroacupucture even though there are 361 acupuncture points in the human body and various kinds of stimulation methods using traditional needles and moxibustion. Therefore, we suggest that researchers should pay more attention to the study on basic AM research creatively and systematically through strengthening and enhancing the cooperation among colleges, research institutes and hospitals. Moreover, in order to promote the basic research of the AM, it is required that we need cross-disciplinary research as well as international collaboration research.

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