ECT on PubMed—Meta Blog Post
So, about 17,200 citations total in the ECT literature, with peaks in 1956 (355) and 1986 (307), and a nadir in 1973 (107), and 550 as of this writing in 2020. (The search of "convulsive therapy," a common earlier name for the treatment, is complicated; most of the 21,000 hits are either actually "electroconvulsive therapy" or something not ECT, but many from the early years are correctly "convulsive therapy." The more recent ones cannot be correct, as the term is no longer widely used.)
The graphs are a reminder that searching "ECT" gives incomplete results and a lot of extraneous other "ect"s that have nothing to do with psychiatry (the most common one is probably "electrochemotherapy.")
I hope you will do your own frequent searching of PubMed, but also look at this blog, and consider adding your comments. Thanks for reading.
Dr. Kellner,
ReplyDeleteThis otherwise-overlooked data is fascinating and thank you for bringing this to our attention.
I am particularly impressed by the sharp rise in ECT-related citations in the last few years.
I draw two major lessons from this data:
1. While ECT is celebrating 83 years of service in the year 2021, it nevertheless remains relevant and useful... perhaps increasingly useful based upon the number of scientific papers written about it, and ..
2. We still don't know everything that is to be known about ECT - - otherwise, why so many publications!
- Vaughn McCall