An altmetric analysis of the research literature about traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine

The use of traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine (TCIM) is known to be popular worldwide; there have been over 200,000 research articles published on this topic as of 2024. For decades, traditional citation-based metrics have been the assumed norm when assessing the impact of research, but in the digital age, alternative metrics (altmetrics) have also become a valuable proxy. By analyzing trends associated with the altmetrics of scholarly outputs relating to TCIM, patterns of social engagement were identified to obtain a better understanding of the factors that drive social impact in this field online. This study was conducted using Altmetric.com, whereby this database was searched by the subject area “Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine”. The subsequent data obtained was further analyzed to discern social trends within TCIM scholarly outputs at the article level. 62,278 research outputs, from 1925 to 2024, with +497,000 online mentions were analyzed. Outputs from the Journal of Natural Products were mentioned the most frequently online (n = 5314, 10.56 %). The highest average Altmetric attention scores were associated with news outputs (M = 203.67), and outputs published under a bronze OA type (M = 17.54). The most mentions were contributed by X (n = 350,630, 70.41 %), Facebook (n = 57,540, 11.55 %), and news outlets (n = 39,941, 8.02 %). Using the features found in this study to be linked with higher online attention, and sharing research through well-used online platforms, may help make TCIM research more visible to the public and more relevant to policy discussions.