Scientometric study of academic publications on herbal medicines in Endocrinology & Metabolism Research Institute (EMRI) of Tehran University of Medical Sciences

Background After the emphasis of the World Health Organization (WHO) on herbal medicines as the primary source for the care and treatment of some diseases, scientific publications increased in this regard. A significant body of basic and clinical researches in the field of herbal medicines are conducted in Endocrinology and Metabolism Research Institute (EMRI). This scientometric study is investigated to assess the global scientific production of EMRI in field of herbal medicines and endocrine disorders. Methods Some of our search terms were "herbal medicine", "Chinese medicine", "traditional medicine", "endocrine", "metabolism", and "emri" from Scopus, Web of Science (WOS), and PubMed databases until June 20, 2020. Extracted data including first author, journal name, publication year, type of paper and number of citations were analyzed using analysis tools provided by Scopus, WOS databases, and SPSS version 15. Results Overall, 126 studies affiliated to EMRI were published on this topic. The number of these publications showed a non-significant increasing time trend. Majority of the published papers were original articles (>60%) and the two top subject areas were medicine and drug. The documents were cited totally 2900, and 2377 times with an average citation/article 29.59, and 24.76 in Scopus and WOS, respectively. The h-index of documents were 28 and 25, in Scopus and WOS, respectively. The highest cited article was a systematic review study in field of diabetes, and top source was "Daru Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences". Top author was affiliated to EMRI, followed by an author from pharmaceutical reserachers as national co-authorship. The highest international co-authorship was with the US. Conclusions A promising scientific productivity is shown in the studied field. However, the number of publications is insufficient, and more evidence-based publications are required on this topic.