Bibliometric analysis of meditation as interventions for mental and behavioral disorders: performance, intellectual structure, and thematic evolution (2000–2024)

Abstract

Bibliometric Analysis of Meditation-Based Interventions for Mental and Behavioral Disorders: Performance, Intellectual Structure, and Thematic Evolution (2000–2024) Objectives This study will conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of meditation-based interventions for mental and behavioral disorders published between 2000 and 2024. It will examine publication and citation performance, identify the intellectual foundations of the field through co-citation analysis, delineate contemporary research fronts through bibliographic coupling, and trace thematic development through co-word analysis. Institution- and country-level co-authorship networks will also be examined as a supplementary analysis of the field’s social and collaborative structure. Studies exclusively examining yoga will be excluded from the intervention scope. Eligible mental and behavioral disorders will be limited to conditions classified under ICD-10 Chapter V (F00–F99) or the DSM-5. Records retrieved from all selected databases will be merged, deduplicated, screened, and analysed as one collective corpus. No database will be treated as the primary corpus, and no separate database-level bibliometric analyses will be conducted. Citation counts will be interpreted as indicators of scholarly attention and influence rather than scientific merit or methodological quality. This interpretation will follow the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and the first principle of the Leiden Manifesto (Hicks et al., 2015). Individual authors will not be quantitatively ranked. Research Questions RQ1—Performance: How will publication output and citation impact have evolved between 2000 and 2024, and which journals, institutions, and countries will have contributed most prominently to the field? RQ2—Intellectual structure—the past: Which foundational intellectual clusters and seminal works will be identified through co-citation analysis of shared cited references across the collective corpus? RQ3—Contemporary research fronts—the present: Which active thematic clusters will characterize contemporary research on meditation-based interventions for mental and behavioral disorders, as identified through bibliographic coupling of documents published between 2019 and 2024? RQ4—Thematic trajectories—the future: How will the field’s conceptual themes have evolved, and which emerging topics will indicate possible future research directions, as identified through co-word analysis of the collective corpus and the temporal periods 2000–2009, 2010–2016, and 2017–2024? Information Sources Systematic searches will be conducted in the following databases: OpenAlex; PubMed/MEDLINE; Scopus; PsycINFO; and The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Each database will be searched independently using an equivalent version of the search strategy. The syntax, controlled vocabulary, proximity operators, truncation symbols, and field codes will be adapted to the requirements of each database without changing the underlying concepts or eligibility scope. All databases will contribute records to the same collective corpus. Records will not be excluded or assigned lower priority because of the database from which they will have been retrieved. Crossref will not function as a primary search database. It will be used only for DOI verification and bibliographic metadata enrichment, including the completion or correction of author names, publication years, journal titles, and other record-level information. Web of Science will not be searched because access to its cited-reference data will not be available. Its non-inclusion will be reported as a limitation. Search Strategy The searches will be conducted and finalized between 1 August 2026 and 27 August 2026. The search strategy will combine two principal concepts: Meditation and mindfulness-based interventions; and Mental and behavioral disorders. Equivalent searches will be applied to the title and abstract fields of each database wherever those fields will be available. Controlled vocabulary, including MeSH terms in PubMed/MEDLINE and thesaurus terms in PsycINFO, will supplement the free-text search. Concept 1: Meditation and Mindfulness-Based Interventions The intervention concept will include terms for: Meditation; Mindfulness; Mindfulness-based intervention; Mindfulness-based stress reduction; MBSR; Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy; MBCT; Transcendental meditation; Vipassana; Loving-kindness meditation; and Contemplative practice. Relevant spelling variants, plural forms, truncations, abbreviations, and database-specific subject headings will be included where appropriate. Yoga will not be used as an independent intervention search term. Studies exclusively examining yoga will fall outside the review scope. However, a study involving yoga will remain potentially eligible when it will also include an explicitly named and substantively described meditation or mindfulness-based intervention. Concept 2: Mental and Behavioral Disorders The disorder concept will include terms corresponding to mental and behavioral disorder classes recognized under ICD-10 Chapter V (F00–F99) and the DSM-5. The search will include terms for relevant diagnostic groups, including neurodevelopmental, psychotic, mood, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, trauma-related, dissociative, somatic symptom, eating, sleep-wake, substance-related, addictive, personality, cognitive, and other clinically defined mental or behavioral disorders. Broad terms such as “mental health,” “mental disorder,” “psychiatric disorder,” and “psychological distress” will be retained at the search stage to reduce the risk of under-retrieval. The requirement for an eligible ICD-10 or DSM-5 disorder will subsequently be enforced during title and abstract screening through explicit eligibility rules. The intervention and disorder concepts will be combined using the Boolean operator AND. Search filters will be limited to the publication years 2000–2024. Language and document-type restrictions will preferably be applied during screening rather than through database filters, so the numbers of records excluded for these reasons will be transparently documented. The complete search strategy for every database, including the date of searching and the number of records retrieved, will be reported in an appendix or supplementary file. Formation of the Collective Corpus All records retrieved from OpenAlex, PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, PsycINFO, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews will be exported and combined into one preliminary dataset. The source database of each record will be retained for search documentation, deduplication, and preparation of the PRISMA flow diagram. However, database provenance will not be used to divide the eligible publications into separate analytical corpora. After deduplication and eligibility screening, all unique eligible publications will form one collective analytical corpus. Performance analysis, citation analysis, co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, co-word analysis, and co-authorship analysis will be conducted using this collective corpus or the prespecified temporal subset of this corpus. Deduplication Duplicate records will be identified and removed before title and abstract screening through the following sequential procedure: DOI values will be cleaned by removing URL prefixes, converting letters to lowercase, removing spaces, and standardizing punctuation. Records will first be matched using exact normalized DOI values. Records without a usable DOI will be matched using PubMed identifiers, OpenAlex Work identifiers, Scopus identifiers, or other database-specific identifiers. Remaining potential duplicates will be identified using normalized combinations of title, publication year, first-author name, and journal title. Approximate or fuzzy title matching will be used to identify possible duplicates containing minor spelling, punctuation, or indexing differences. Potential duplicates that cannot be resolved automatically will be manually examined before removal. When duplicate records contain different amounts of information, the most complete version will be retained as the primary record. Relevant non-conflicting metadata from duplicate versions will be merged into the retained record. Citation counts obtained from different sources will not be added together. The number of records retrieved from each database, the number of duplicates removed, and the number remaining for screening will be reported in the PRISMA flow diagram. Multiple reports describing substantively different studies will be retained as separate publications. Multiple database records describing the same publication will be treated as duplicates and merged. Inclusion Criteria A publication will be included when it meets all the following criteria: It will have been published between 2000 and 2024, inclusive. It will be a journal article or review, including a systematic review or meta-analysis. It will substantively examine at least one named meditation or mindfulness-based intervention within the declared scope. The eligible intervention will appear in the title or structured abstract or will be identified as a primary intervention, exposure, or comparator condition. It will substantively address at least one mental or behavioral disorder classified under ICD-10 Chapter V (F00–F99) or the DSM-5. A diagnosable or clinically defined disorder will be named in the title or abstract, or the study population will have been recruited on the basis of a formal diagnosis or a standardized clinical threshold on a validated assessment instrument. It will have been published in English. A publication will not be required to have been retrieved from more than one database. Retrieval from any one of the selected databases will be sufficient for consideration, provided that the publication will meet all eligibility criteria. Exclusion Criter