Abstract
The current study aimed to provide a comprehensive bibliometric overview of the literature on curcumin, complementing the previous reviews and meta-analyses on its potential health benefits. Bibliometric data for the current analysis were extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection database, using the search string TOPIC=(“curcumin*”), and analyzed by the VOSviewer software. The search yielded 18,036 manuscripts. The ratio of original articles to reviews was 10.4:1. More than half of the papers have been published since 2014. The major contributing countries were the United States, China, India, Japan, and South Korea. These publications were mainly published in journals representing the following scientific disciplines: biochemistry, chemistry, oncology, and pharmacology. There was a significant positive correlation between the total publication count and averaged citations per manuscript for affiliations, but not for countries/regions and journals. Chemicals that were frequently mentioned in the keywords of evaluated curcumin publications included curcuminoids, resveratrol, chitosan, flavonoids, quercetin, and polyphenols. The literature mainly focused on curcumin’s effects against cancer, inflammation, and oxidative stress. Cancer types most frequently investigated were breast, colon, colorectal, pancreatic, and prostate cancers.
Highlights
Turmeric (Curcuma longa L., Zingiberaceae) is traditionally used in Indian medicine for the treatment of various illnesses, mainly connected with inflammatory processes
The earliest articles on curcumin indexed in Web of Science (WoS) were published in 1970 and 1971, and they investigated the hypocholesterolemic effect of curcumin in rats [26,27]
According to a previous bibliometric study, Curcuma papers oriented to nutraceuticals and functional foods research fields received large contributions from the UK and European states [23]
Summary
Turmeric (Curcuma longa L., Zingiberaceae) is traditionally used in Indian medicine for the treatment of various illnesses, mainly connected with inflammatory processes. List database (http://www.theplantlist.org), the Curcuma genus includes more than 93 species, with different use and content of active substances. Turmeric is cultivated mainly in India, China, Indonesia, Jamaica, and Peru. The medicinal applications of turmeric have been known for thousands of years, especially by Ayurvedic therapy, which uses turmeric for stomach disorders, as a tonic, for blood cleansing, as well as for prevention or treatment of skin diseases. The contemporary focus on turmeric and its substances can be tracked back to the 1970s, when mechanisms of its anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and antioxidant properties started to be evaluated. Readers should note that most of the scientific papers reporting the biological effects of curcumin represent preliminary in vitro data, obtained with biochemical (cell-free) assays or on cell culture models
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