Previously submitted to: JMIR Mental Health (no longer under consideration since Sep 29, 2025)
Date Submitted: Sep 29, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A Systematic Bibliometric Analysis of Virtual Reality Research in Mental Health: Trends, Hotspots, and Future Directions.
ABSTRACT
Background:
With the increasing maturity of the technology and the gradual reduction of costs, virtual reality is playing an increasingly important role in clinical therapy.
Objective:
This study aims to analyze the current status and developmental trends of virtual reality (VR) research in mental health.
Methods:
We analyzed 1,116 publications spanning from 1994 to 2022, sourced from the Web of Science. Our analysis included visualization of authorship, institutional affiliations, countries, cited literature, and key terms.
Results:
Harvard Medical School emerged as the leading institution in terms of publication volume in this field. Giuseppe Riva was identified as the most prolific author in VR mental health research. The American Journal of Psychiatry was distinguished by its high centrality and impact factor (IF = 17.7, 2022). Recent trends, indicated by emerging keywords and citation bursts, point to growing research interests in areas such as geriatric mental health, environmental influences, and pain management. The predominant research hotspots over the past two decades have been schizophrenia, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, with emerging frontiers in the study of environmental factors and pain.
Conclusions:
This study systematically outlines the evolution, current landscape, and potential future directions of VR research in mental health, offering valuable insights for researchers in the field.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.