BACKGROUND: Although structured abstracts are becoming common in English-language journals, little is known about papers written in languages other than English.
METHODS: To identify the percentages of reports of clinical trials with structured abstracts that are written in languages other than English, we used the PubMed to retrieve clinical trial reports written in seven languages other than English from 1987 to 2001.
RESULTS: A total of 23, 075 reports of clinical trials written in seven languages other than English were identified. Of the 18, 278 reports that included abstracts, the share of structured abstracts in each language was as follows (entire period and 1999-2001 in parenthesis) : German, 17.3% (48.2%) ; French, 16.1% (45.1%) ; Italian, 21.3% (76.3%) ; Spanish, 44.7% (74.9%) ; Russian, 4.9% (17.4%) ; Chinese, 21.3% (100%), and Japanese, 3.5% (10.4%) .
CONCLUSIONS: This study revealed that structured abstracts written in languages other than English have become popular, particularly since the late 1990s. However, the percentages of reports that include structured abstracts differ greatly among these languages.

The analysis of research activities is becoming important, and there has been an increase of interest in bibliometrics as a useful technique to determine research activities quantitatively. The purpose of this bibliometric survey is to study the present state of the scientitic papers in the field of traditional medicine. Using MEDLINE from 1966 to 1991, 9839 papers were selected as this research materials. The papers in the field of traditional medicine were divided to some subject areas that were acupuncture, therapeutic cults, osteopathic medicine, and chiropractic. The size of papers and the distribution of papers by country were analyzed. Based on the 81 papers from Japan in the 1987 through 1991 period, the ranking of the number of papers by organization was shown. In order to analysis the research activities in traditinal medicine, more bibliometric survey can be expected in the fufure.