Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis of Research Articles on TCM’s International Spread

Abstract Based on 1185 research articles related to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) from 2020 to 2023 retrieved from the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus databases, a comprehensive systematic literature review was conducted with the primary aim of exploring the main contributors, research status, hot topics and research frontiers concerning the international spread of TCM against the COVID-19 pandemic through a metrical and visualization analysis. CiteSpace 6.1. R6 software is applied to visualize the publication countries, subjects, authors, institutes, publication sources, keywords and references of the literature and to draw a visual knowledge graph. PRISMA 2020 was used to evaluate the scientificity of this study itself, and the PRISMA 2020 scores generally showed good quality of the systematic review, conforming to 29 out of 37 items, partly in accordance with 2 items of TCM. The statistics of this study show that 81% of articles published are from China, followed by 8.2% from the USA and 5.3% from India. Moreover, the research hotspots of coronavirus in the articles involve molecular docking, sar, systematic review and herbal medicine. Moreover, the principal proposition of translation strategies in TCM’s international spread is the combination of domestication and foreignization to maintain the originality of TCM’s nature and to give consideration to the cognition of audiences. Instead of blindly merging into the Western medicine system, the international spread of TCM ought to broaden its span and to convey the theoretical framework, philosophical thoughts and traditional culture as a whole. In addition, cooperation between research institutes can be further strengthened to deliver an integrated and united research pattern.