Bibliometrics

The shape of placebo research

A descriptive analysis of the papers in this database: how the literature has grown, what kinds of studies are published, in whom, measured how, and where. Figures are recomputed from the database on every build, so they reflect the collection as it stands today (papers marked adjacent are included in the year and tag charts; the most-cited list is core papers only). Every bar and band is clickable and opens the matching papers in the database in a new tab. How papers are found and tagged is described on the methods page.

Prior work. The first dedicated bibliometric study of this literature used the JIPS database: Weimer K, Buschhart C, Broelz EK, Enck P, Horing B. Bibliometric properties of placebo literature from the JIPS database: a descriptive study. Frontiers in Psychiatry 2022. They analysed about 5,000 curated articles from 1946 onward and described publication growth, article types, topics, authorship networks and citation impact, comparing placebo research with addiction research as a reference field. The figures below follow the same descriptive spirit on an automatically screened and tagged collection, and add the tag axes this site assigns (study focus, design, population, outcome modality, findings).

Notes. Tags are machine-assigned from titles and abstracts and carry some error; counts for the current year are partial. Author counts use PubMed surname plus initials, so two people sharing a name are merged and one person with variant initials is split. Citation counts come from OpenAlex where available. The database is seeded with the JIPS monthly lists (2016 to 2025) and a PubMed backfill of the older literature, so coverage before 2016 depends on PubMed indexing and the search terms described on the about page.