SYSTEMATIC REVIEW and META ANALYSIS OF EPHEDRA and RELATED COMPUNDS in WEB OF SCIENCE (WOS) BETWEEN 1980-2022
M.Sc. Nurdan Sandikci Kenan1,2*, PhD. Hafize Hikmet Sevil Atasoy1,2,3, Burak Sandikci4
1: Üsküdar University Institute of Addiction and Forensic Sciences
2: Üsküdar University Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Department of Forensic Science
3: United Nations International Narcotics Control Board
4: Karabük University Faculty of Engineering, Departman of Computer engineering
* Corresponding author: nurdan.kenan@uskudar.edu.tr

According to the 2021 UNODC World Drug Report, there are 27 million methamphetamine and amphetamine users worldwide as of 2019, and 325 tons of methamphetamine were seized, with an increase of 43% compared to the previous year (1). Developing pioneer controls in order to prevent increased substance use; the production of illegal substances is becoming more and more complex. Illegal production of methamphetamine often involves the reduction of pseudoephedrine and/or ephedrine to methamphetamine. Pseudoephedrine and ephedrine are usually obtained from pharmaceutical preparations available from drug stores or pharmacies. In recent years; the ephedra plant, also known as Ma-Huang in Asia, is used as a natural source of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine (2). For the stated reasons, the development of analysis methods of ephedra and its alkaloids is important in the fight against methamphetamine. In this study it was aimed to search Web of Science (WOS), a website that provides comprehensive citation data for many different academic disciplines and provides subscription-based access to multiple databases, for a meta-analysis about Ephedra analysis. The search, specialized by using ‘AND’ word, was carried out by using following keywords: ‘Ephedra and Analysis’, ‘Ma-Huang and Analysis’, ‘Ephedrine and Analysis’, ‘Pseudoephedrine and Analysis’. Search results for each keyword were downloaded from the website in CVS format, and replicated results were extracted with the code written in Phyton+Phyton Pandas Library (version 3.8).