between publication year and the cumulative numberof hirudotherapy was noted and the peak year of productivity was2015 with 951 citations. A significant increase of the citations was detected after 2009 (Fig. 2).3.5. Keyword analysis of the publicationsA detailed keyword analysis by retrieving all the articles fromWoS Core Collection database revealed that the most usedkeywords were“leech therapy”,“leech”,“leeches”,“Hirudo medic-inalis”,“hirudin”,“venous congestion”,“hirudotherapy”,“osteoar-thritis”,“medicinal leech”and“Unani medicine”. A keywordnetwork infographic generated by using most used keywords ac-cording to their frequency showed that the most connectedkeyword was“leech therapy”(Fig. 3). As we created a relationshipnetwork among countries publishing in thisfield, a linear networkcentering the USA was found. Connection network analysis of theinstitutions also revealed a linear pattern. Andreas Michalsen, oneof the top productive authors, was the most connected author inthe hirudotherapyfield from Charite- Universit€atsmedizin Berlin inGermany.4. DiscussionThe terms of“scientometrics”and“bibliometrics”are almostidentical and can be used interchangeable. These are statisticalanalysis of academic literature investigating scientific features ofthe studied area such as authors, countries, keywords and publi-cation trends. Thefirst bibliometric study was performed byCampbell in 1896 and the term of“bibliometrics”wasfirst used byFig. 1.Global hirudotherapy publication density according to the countries.E. S ̧ enel et al. / Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine 11 (2020) Pritchard in 1969[12]. We found only one conference proceedinginvestigating scientometric feature of hirudotherapy literature. Inthis report, only 172 documents published between 1975 and 2016retrieved from WoS database were included. The USA was found tobe the leading country as detected in our study[13].Since thefirst definition of scientometrics in the research byNalimov and Mulchenko, only a few bibliometric and scientometricstudies have been reported in the complimentary literature andalmost all of which were on the acupuncturefield[14]. Ma et al.found 13,320 documents of the acupuncture literature retrievedfrom PubMed database and reported that China (47.4%), the USA(17.5%) and UK (8.2%) were the top contributors in thisfield[15].Zhou et al. performed a bibliometric assessment on the literature ofacupoint herbal patching, which had been widely used in Chinesemedicine for thousands of years, reported that a total of 937 articleswere published in thisfield and nearly all studies were from China(99.89%)[16]. Koo reported a recent bibliometric analysis onaromatherapy literature by searching WoS database and found 549published items. The USA was the leading country with 107 articles(19.5%) and Complementary Therapies in Medicine published themost cited documents in this area[17]. Although these recentstudies provided a bibliometric evaluation on traditional andcomplementary medicine, most of them did not rank countriesaccording to productivity scores. S ̧ enel and Demir performed ascientometric evaluation of apitherapy literature and noted thatBrazil was leading country with 889 of 6917 publications in thisfield followed by the USA and China. As the authors measured theproductivity of the countries in apitherapy literature they foundthat the most