India.Jalaukavacharanais apainless, minimal invasive technique of controlled bloodletting(Raktamokshana)[3].Acharya Sushruta, a physician in ancient India,also known as“father of surgery”(7thor 6thcentury BC) stated thatone who undergoesRaktamokshanaperiodically does not sufferwithSopha roga(edema),Twak roga(skin diseases) andGranthiroga(diseases with nodules)[3]. In the last several decades, hir-udotherapy has become a popular part of complementary medicine[4]. In recent studies more than 20 bioactive molecules having anti-inflammatory, analgesic, antimicrobial and anticoagulant proper-ties were reported from medicinal leeches[5,6].Scientometrics also known as“science of science”, is a term usedfor the evaluation and investigation of all aspects of scientificliterature. Scientometric studies are more extensive than biblio-metric researches that only analyze the documents in a certainliterature[7]. Scientiometric studies also examine the characteris-tics of the countries, organizations, and authors of the articles in theliterature. To the best of our knowledge, this study is thefirst toinvestigate scientometric features of hirudotherapy literature.2. Materials and methodsThe data of this study was collected from four databases (Web ofScience Core Collection, Korean Journal Database, Russian ScienceCitation Index and SciELO Citation Index) provided by Web of Sci-ence (WoS) (Thomson Reuters, New York, USA). The keywords used*Corresponding author.E-mail:enginsenel@enginsenel.com.Pee The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Institute of Transdisciplinary Health Sciences and Technology and World Ayurveda Foundation. This isan open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Journal of “hirudotherapy”,“leech therapy”,“medicinal leech”and“medicinal leech therapy”. Items published during the period of1975e2017 were included. Documents published from England,Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were mentioned under the“UK”title, while publications from Germany, East Germany, WestGermany and Federal Republic of Germany were united under“Germany”and“China”was used as the title for China and People'sRepublic of China. The statistical analyses were performed usingthe SPSS (version 22.0, SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA); licensed for HititUniversity, Çorum, Turkey, while for the infographics showingworld distribution density of hirudotherapy literature the Gunn-Map free resource was used[8]. Bibliometric networks showingusage density and relationships of the keywords in the documentswas generated, where the more used keywords formed the largerrings than the others with lower usage in network images. Relatedand connected keywords were placed close to each other with thesame color and the VOSviewer software to create network imageswas used[9].3. Results3.1. Number of published documentsA total of 834 items were retrieved, 304 of which were indexedin WoS Core Collection. The majority of the publications wereoriginal articles (89.8%), followed by case reports (20.98%) and re-views (18.7%) (Table 1). The USA