OBJECTIVEIn China, people have relied on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for thousands of years to keep healthy and treat diseases. TCM also plays an important role in military health services and now forms a new discipline called military Chinese medicine (MCM). However, the type, quality and focus of research articles about MCM have not been reported. The present study was performed to analyze the growing trends of MCM and investigate China's contribution to military health services.

METHODSChina's MCM publications were retrieved from the PubMed database, as well as China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang Data and Chongqing VIP database from 2005 to 2014.

RESULTSThe study found that the number of published articles increased markedly from 2005 to 2014. Basic research studies comprised a small percentage of the literature. Among these studies, military training injury and special military environmental medicine were the most common research subjects in MCM. Military hospitals were the main institutions generating MCM literature.

CONCLUSIONThe quality of MCM research is generally low, as indicated by the proportion of publications in core journals. Studies on MCM still lack high-quality publications and international cooperation.