Thematic Trends in Complementary and Alternative Medicine Applied in Cancer-Related Symptoms
Article Category: Research Paper
Published Online: Jun 22, 2018
Page range: 1 - 19
Received: Apr 07, 2018
Accepted: May 28, 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2018-0006
Keywords
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
Purpose
The main goal of this study is to discover the scientific evolution of Cancer-Related Symptoms in Complementary and Alternative Medicine research area, analyzing the articles indexed in the Web of Science database from 1980 to 2013.
Design/Methodology/Approach
A co-word science mapping analysis is performed under a longitudinal framework (1980 to 2013). The documental corpus is divided into two subperiods, 1980–2008 and 2009–2013. Thus, the performance and impact rates, and conceptual evolution of the research field are shown.
Findings
According to the results, the co-word analysis allows us to identify 12 main thematic areas in this emerging research field: anxiety, survivors and palliative care, meditation, treatment, symptoms and cancer types, postmenopause, cancer pain, low back pain, herbal medicine, children, depression and insomnia, inflammation mediators, and lymphedema. The different research lines are identified according to the main thematic areas, centered fundamentally on anxiety and suffering prevention. The scientific community can use this information to identify where the interest is focused and make decisions in different ways.
Research limitation
Several limitations can be addressed: 1) some of the Complementary and Alternative Medicine therapies may not have been included; 2) only the documents indexed in Web of Science are analyzed; and 3) the thematic areas detected could change if another dataset was considered.
Practical implications
The results obtained in the present study could be considered as an evidence-based framework in which future studies could be built.
Originality/value
Currently, there are no studies that show the thematic evolution of this research area.