Scientometric and Knowledge Mapping of Therapeutic Approaches in Depression Research

Purpose: Depressive disorder is one of the global mental health challenges that reduces the quality of life of individuals. This disorder has economic and social consequences for communities and families. It increases healthcare costs in communities, and it provides a basis for emotional problems in families. Due to the importance of this issue, it is necessary to pay special attention to this disease, because depressed individuals have emotional, cognitive, and physical symptoms that significantly disrupt the individual's life. Also, given that researchers have identified new subgroups of depression, there is a need to consider personalized treatment approaches based on individual symptoms and underlying causes for different profiles of this disease. In this regard, in recent years, most of the research published in the field of depression has focused on treatment approaches for this disorder. On the other hand, the diversity of treatment approaches is great, which has caused the scientific production in this field to be significantly dispersed. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a systematic review of research outputs in the field of depression treatment. To achieve this goal, bibliometric analysis can be used as one of the main tools in scientometrics to identify scientific structure. In this way, it is possible to identify high-frequency therapeutic and complementary treatment approaches based on the keywords used in scientific productions, to determine the activities of researchers and their research interests, and to examine the overall geographical distribution of publications worldwide. Therefore, the present study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of research outputs in the field of depression treatment.
Methodology: The present study was conducted using scientometric techniques and documentary methods. Its research community includes all research outputs in the field of depression treatment indexed in the Web of Science database between 1970 and 2025. To extract data, first, keywords related to the research were identified through the Medical Thesaurus (MeSH), which are: ("Depression" OR "Depressive Disorders" OR "Major Depressive Disorders" OR "Clinical Depression" OR "Involutional Depression" OR "Involutional Melancholia" OR "Involutional Psychoses" OR "Involutional Paraphrenias" OR "Depressive Neuroses" OR "Endogenous Depressions" OR "Melancholia" OR "Unipolar Depression" OR "Depressive Syndromes" OR "Neurotic Depressions") AND ("Therapy" OR "Therapeutics" OR "Treatment") Then, a search was conducted in the Web of Science database and data on the field of depression treatment were extracted in plain text format files. BibExcel and VOSviewer software were used to analyze the research questions. In BibExcel software, raw data can be analyzed, and the frequency of data can be calculated according to the options available in this software. Also, the VOSviewer software was used for visualization and map drawing.
Findings: Cognitive behavioral therapy, psychotherapy, electroconvulsive therapy, and pharmacotherapy were highly frequent. In a cluster analysis focused on treatment, therapeutic and complementary treatment approaches were divided into seven clusters; Cluster 1 (pharmacology), Cluster 2 (psychotherapy), Cluster 3 (neuromodulation and physical interventions), Cluster 4 (lifestyle and activity complementary therapies), Cluster 5 (general concepts of treatment and intervention design), Cluster 6 (technology-based complementary therapies), and Cluster 7 (complementary and traditional therapies). Also, the word pairs (major depressive disorder - electroconvulsive therapy), (major depressive disorder - cognitive behavioral therapy), (major depressive disorder - psychotherapy), (major depressive disorder - transcranial magnetic stimulation) were frequently repeated. The top author in the field of depression treatment is Michael Tas from the University of Pennsylvania, and the top country is the United States. The United States and Canada had the most co-authors.
Conclusion: A variety of treatment approaches have been used in scientific publications in the field of depression treatment. However, cognitive behavioral therapy is more prevalent than other treatment approaches; it seems that cognitive behavioral therapy is the first choice for treating depression. The frequency of terms related to emerging treatments, including ketamine and neuromodulation techniques, is significant. There was also a lack of some treatment approaches, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction treatments, functional analytical psychotherapy, and attachment-based psychotherapy. A review of top researchers showed that one of the reasons for their superiority may be due to their organizational affiliation, because the activities of organizations in a specific subject area encourage researchers to publish in that area. A gap and imbalance were observed in the geographical distribution among countries, such that the first ranks belong to high-income countries and have a greater capacity to provide research funding for the field of depression treatment. Finally, the findings of this study help professionals make more informed decisions in clinical practice. Mental health planners can also use the findings of this study to target clinical plans.