Whole field tendencies in transcranial magnetic stimulation: A systematic review with data and text mining

BackgroundTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has played an important role in the fields of psychiatry, neurology and neuroscience, since its emergence in the mid-1980s; and several high quality reviews have been produced since then. Most high quality reviews serve as powerful tools in the evaluation of predefined tendencies, but they cannot actually uncover new trends within the literature. However, special statistical procedures to ‘mine’ the literature have been developed which aid in achieving such a goal.ObjectivesThis paper aims to uncover patterns within the literature on TMS as a whole, as well as specific trends in the recent literature on TMS for the treatment of depression.MethodsData mining and text mining.ResultsCurrently there are 7299 publications, which can be clustered in four essential themes. Considering the frequency of the core psychiatric concepts within the indexed literature, the main results are: depression is present in 13.5% of the publications; Parkinson's disease in 2.94%; schizophrenia in 2.76%; bipolar disorder in 0.158%; and anxiety disorder in 0.142% of all the publications indexed in PubMed. Several other perspectives are discussed in the article.