Data sources and search strategy

Data were collected from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database, the search terms were as follows: Title="MBT” OR “Mind Body Therapies” OR “MBT” OR “therapies, Mind-Body” OR “therapy, Mind-Body” OR “MBT” OR “Mind Body Medicine” OR “Yoga” OR “meditation” OR “Tai Chi” OR “Relaxation Therapy” OR “imagery, Psychotherapy” OR “Hypnosis” OR “Biofeedback” OR “Psychology” OR “acupuncture”. The search was restricted to English-language “Articles” and “Review Articles”. Editorial materials, conference abstracts, correspondence, and book chapters were excluded. The literature screening process is presented in Fig. 1. The search covered from the database’s establishment to April 17, 2024. Two researchers independently collected data. Discrepancies in the results were resolved through consensus-building via negotiation or consultation with experts. Finally, a total of 29,710 articles matched the inclusion criteria of the research.

Fig. 1

Article selection process

Bibliometric analysis

The retrieved literature was exported from the database in text file format, and the exported catalog mainly contains the title, abstract, keywords, author, country, institution, publication year, journal and other information. The data were imported into the R package “Bibliometrix”, CiteSpace(v6.3.R1) and VOSviewer (v1.6.20) for subsequent bibliometric analysis. VOSviewer is a software tool for visualizing and analyzing scholarly citation networks. Using VOSviewer, researchers can explore relationships between research hotspots and identify domain hotspots [21]. Similar to VOSviewer, CiteSpace not only supports visual analysis based on literature citation network but also offers a series of analysis methods, including cluster analysis, co-occurrence analysis, burst word analysis, time graph analysis and co-citation analysis. These methods can comprehensively demonstrate important research topics, hot spots and their evolution in the academic field, and highlight influential papers and their citations [22]. In the network diagram generated by VOSviewer and CiteSpace, nodes can represent different countries, institutions, authors, or keywords. The size of a node reflects the number of publications associated with it, while different colors indicate different clusters or years. Lines between nodes show collaboration or reference relationships. Bibliometrix is a package that must be used in the R software environment, with more powerful and general literature analysis capabilities, primarily for quantitative analysis, and enables a greater degree of customization [23]. This paper uses R package “Bibliometrix”, to conduct quantitative statistics of data of countries, authors and institutions, and draw Sankey diagrams and thematic words diagrams; VOSviewer is used to create co-occurrence and density maps for authors, institutions, and keywords; CiteSpace is used for keyword cluster analysis, keyword time zone map, burst word analysis and reference co-citation analysis. In addition, Bibliometrix is combined with VOSviewer for global geographic visualization of publications. Subject visualizations generated on the scientific WOS database website are also incorporated with a view to a comprehensive analysis of the MBT.3. Results.

Overview of publication status

According to the search strategy, 29,710 articles were screened from the WoSCC database from 1999 to 2024 (Fig. 2). The average number of citations per paper was 25.80, including 10 articles with more than 1500 citations. Overall, 64,012 authors from 102 regions and countries have published literature on MBT in 3,867 journals worldwide.

Fig. 2

Annual publication volumes and average citations per year in the field of MBT

Publications on MBT have increased significantly over the past 24 years, with the highest number of related articles published in 2021, accounting for about 8% of all original articles on MBT. This study conducted a statistical analysis on the publication time and citation volume of the 29,717 literatures included. The trend of annual publications is shown in Fig. 2. The annual publication volume in this field has been generally increasing. In the initial stage of the study (1999–2007), the number of publications increased slowly, while in the later stage (2008–2021), it increased rapidly and reached its peak in 2021. Since 2021, the publication volume has shown a slight decline, but the number of publications remains high.

Countries and institutions analysis

Since 1999, a total of 102 countries have published articles related to MBT, of which 9 have published more than a hundred. In the top 10 countries are the United States, China, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, South Korea, Canada, Spain, Italy, India. It shows that these countries have invested more attention in the field of psychosomatic medical research. The countries with high centrality (> 0.10) are United States, Spain, United Kingdom, Australia, indicating that these four countries occupy an important position in international cooperation. United States provided a total of 10,448 articles, accounting for 35.2% of the total number of publications (Fig. 3 A, B).

A total of 8,418 research institutions participated in the research of MBT, of which 150 institutions published more than 100 relevant papers. The top 10 research institutions by a number of publications are Harvard University, the University of California System, Kyung Hee University, Harvard Medicine School, China Medical university Taiwan, Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Chengdu University of Chinese Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences and the University of California Los Angeles. (Fig. 3C). Harvard University is the most prolific institution, with 1051 publications. Institutions with high centrality include Harvard University, the University of California System, and the University of London.

Fig. 3

Country collaboration network (A) and Number of national publications (B), single country publication (SCP) means that the authors of the article are all from the same country, and multiple country publication (MCP) means that the authors of the article are from more than one country. Top 10 disciplines related to physical and mental medicine (C) in the field of MBT

Authors analysis

64,012 authors contributed to publications in the field of psychosomatic medicine, of which 69 published more than 50 articles. The top 10 authors for both publications and citations are from China, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany. WANG Y published the most articles (200), followed by LI Y(163) and Kim E. Innes (157). Similarly, the number of citations is also an important indicator to measure the quality and influence of an article. Hugh MacPherson, Klaus Linde, and Claudia Witt are the authors who have published articles with more than 2100 citations (Table 1).

Table 1 The top 10 authors by number of publications and citations

The cooperative network diagram is in a dispersed state, and the author centrality is low, indicating that the current academic community has not yet formed a good cooperative relationship and the scientific research power is relatively dispersed (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4

The network of co-authors (A), The co-occurrence density map of research institutions (B), timeline Chart of (C), The color represents the time when the keyword appears, from blue to yellow, the closer the color is to blue, the earlier the keyword appears, the closer the color is to yellow, the later the keyword appears. Top 10 countries (D) in the field of MBT

Journal analysis

A total of 3867 journals have published articles related to MBT, of which 47 journals have published more than 100 articles. Identification magazine is Evidence - most -based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Medicine, Journal Of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Acupuncture in Medicine, Teaching Of Psychology, Frontiers In Psychology, Complementary Therapies In Medicine, Plos One, American Psychologist, Trials. The top 10 journals were dominated by those in the JCRQ1 and Q3 regions (Table 2).

Table 2 Top 10 most published and top 10 cited magazinesKeyword analysis

Through the analysis of the keywords of the literature, the research hotspots and core contents of this field can be discovered. This paper conducted a keyword co-occurrence analysis of the literature on MBT through VOSviewer, and a total of 54,542 keywords were identified. As shown in Fig. 6A, the co-occurrence of keywords in the field and the 6266 keywords based on more than 5 occurrences are listed based on the keyword mediation centrality (> 0.1) and frequency of occurrence. Nodes in the graph said keywords, the same color of the nodes represent the connection between the keywords closely, the size of the node with the keyword frequency is proportional to the centricity, lines represent the links between nodes, the thickness of line and representative keywords co-occurrence frequency. Keywords in this field mainly included acupuncture, QoL, depression, pain, management, electroacupuncture, randomized controlled trials, exercise, systematic review, anxiety, stress, meta-analysis, prevalence, women, mindfulness, among which QoL, management, and electroacupuncture had better centrality (Table 3). Figure 6D shows the top 50 frequency-ranked keywords and their proportion, clearly demonstrating the research focus in this field.

Fig. 5

Keyword analysis of literature in the field of mind-body therapy. The network of co-occurring keywords (A), Different colors represent different clusters. timeline Chart of Keywords (B), The co-occurrence density map of keywords (C) and Top 50 keywords (D)

Fig. 6

Sankey diagrams for authors (A), Sankey diagrams for countries (B), Analysis of thematic words and keywords (C) and Top 25 keywords with the strongest citation bursts (D)

Table 3 Top 10 keywords in frequency and top 10 keywords in centrality on Mind-Body therapies

Based on the co-occurrence clustering of keywords, the keywords are divided into six clusters: Cluster #0 (green), acupuncture; Cluster #1 (blue), electroacupuncture; Cluster #2 (purple), meditation group; Cluster #3 (red), psychology group; Cluster #4 (yellow), yoga and tai chi group; Cluster #5 (light blue), women’s group. Among them, Cluster #0 mainly includes keywords such as acupuncture, management, breast cancer, QoL, and effectiveness, while Cluster #1 includes keywords such as brain, magnetic resonance imaging, cancer pain, chronic pain, asthma, rhinitis, mainly related to cognitive disorders and pain. Cluster #2 mainly includes keywords such as meditation, emotion regulation, anxiety, depression, heart rate variability, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Cluster #3 mainly includes keywords such as positive psychology, health, education, and happiness, focusing on children, especially adolescents. Cluster #4 has the main keywords of yoga, tai chi, physical activity, and stroke, and its main research object is the elderly. Cluster #5, the female group, has the core keywords of women, pregnancy, childbirth, pain relief, infertility, labor, and physical exercise. From the keyword clustering labels, it can be seen that holistic therapy is more often viewed as an alternative therapy, relying on the guidance of clinical doctors and social support, through various therapies to improve the QoL of patients with various diseases and alleviate symptoms. From the time chart (Fig. 6B) and time zone chart (Fig. 7D), we can infer that academic research on holistic therapy emerged in the 1990s or even earlier. Research on holistic therapy related to anxiety, cancer, pregnancy, etc. has attracted researchers’ attention in 1999 or earlier. Research themes such as cancer, QoL, tai chi, meditation, etc. appeared in 2001–2007, and high-level research methods such as randomized controlled trials also began to be used in this research field. Furthermore, by analyzing the sudden keywords, we can explore the overall trend changes and current research hotspots of holistic therapy. As shown in Fig. 5D, the “Year” column indicates the year when the keyword first appeared, and “Strength” represents the emergence strength of the keyword. The larger the numerical value, the greater the keyword’s influence. The blue line represents the time axis, and the red part represents the sudden duration of the keywords. In addition, “Start” and “End” indicate the starting and ending years of the outbreak. The main outbreak words in the field of MBT from 1999 to 2003 are behavior, children, analgesia, issue, relaxation, pain, science, psychotherapy, memory, placebo, humans, information Stimulation, and evolutionary psychology. The outbreak words in this stage have higher intensity and longer duration. This indicates that the main research content of MBT in this stage is focused on the research of the mechanisms of MBT, the research object of MBT, and the theoretical discussion on the relationship between MBT and psychology. The application of MBT in pain relief and relaxation also attracted people’s attention. From 2004 to 2018, 4 keywords broke out: placebo needle, osteoarthritis, knee, human brain, and fmri. This shows that at this stage, the research focus of MBT mainly includes the following aspects. First, it aims to address psychological issues such as mental breakdowns through the application of cognitive behavioral therapy and other treatments. The second is to provide objective evidence for MBT intervention in diseases such as cognitive impairment through magnetic resonance imaging and other detection methods. In addition, research has focused more on the use of MBT in specific diseases such as osteoarthritis and the psychological effects of placebo. The emerging keywords for MBT from 2019 to 2024 are systematic review, network meta-analysis, inflammation, bibliometric analysis, and case report. These four keywords appeared later and have continued to the present day, and are the frontier of research in MBT. The burst words are mostly related to systematic reviews and case reports, showing that research on MBT has become relatively mature, moving from basic research to clinical trials and aiming for higher evidence levels.

Fig. 7

Reference co-occurrence map (A), reference clustering map (B), reference outbreak map (C) and Burst strength and time duration of the top 25 keywords with the strongest citation bursts (D)

Co-cited reference literature analysis

Co-cited reference literature refers to two or more articles that are cited in the same or multiple articles, which can be used to analyze the relevance between articles. In addition, the prominent analysis of co-cited reference literature can identify the core articles with significant contributions and influence in the research field. The relevance between articles can be shown by the size of the node representing the article and the number of links connecting the nodes in the co-cited reference literature network map based on CiteSpace. Figure 7A shows the co-occurrence of co-cited reference literature, with different colors representing different research periods. Deep purple represents earlier research, and the color gradually changes to deeper red, indicating that the later the article is published, the later its publication date. In addition, the intensity of centrality is proportional to the size of the node. There are a total of 2,528 cited reference articles and 11,751 co-cited links in the figure. Based on this, we conducted a cluster analysis on the co-cited literature to explore common research themes in the field of MBT and summarize the research content of the literature. Figure 7B shows six clusters, including #0 acupuncture, #1 yoga, #2 complementary therapies, #3 meditation, #4 mindfulness, and #5 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The literature with the highest bursting strength (strength = 75.24) comes from Cluster #0, which is a systematic review of acupuncture for chronic pain published in 2012 (Andrew J. Vickers et al., 2012). The review examined back and neck pain, osteoarthritis, chronic headache, and shoulder pain, and the results showed that acupuncture was superior to every pain condition under the control of sham surgery and non-acupuncture controls in all eligible randomized controlled trials. The literature with the most representative of Cluster #1 is the neuroscience of mindfulness meditation (Tang YY et al., 2015). It summarizes psychological and neuroscientific research on meditation in the field of mindfulness from 1995 to 2015, suggesting that mindfulness meditation may lead to structural and functional neural plasticity changes in brain regions involved in attentional, emotional, and self-regulatory processes, however, longitudinal, randomized, and active-controlled research designs and larger sample sizes are needed to promote a deeper understanding of the mindfulness meditation mechanisms involving complex brain network interactions. The results of literature studies indicate that acupuncture, yoga, meditation, imagery, hypnosis, and biofeedback, among other MBT, have proven effective in treating PTSD, anxiety, depression, various types of pain, cancer, coronary artery disease, arthritis, insomnia, and menopausal syndrome, as well as in improving prognosis. In addition, we have listed the top 10 most frequently cited jointly cited references (Table 4) in the field, which mainly describe the current status of the use of MBT and the research status of the diseases being treated. There is now substantial evidence to suggest that a range of MBT can serve as effective alternatives to traditional medical treatments.

Table 4 The top 10 references in terms of citationsRecent trends in research

The core issues in the field of MBT were explored using a topic analysis. Figure 5C shows that the current areas of good development are mainly concentrated in research related to maintaining physical and mental health, with research types mainly being experimental, clinical trials, and reviews, and keywords including “exercise, depression, health, model, brain, performance.” In emerging areas such as electroacupuncture, management, and pain, researchers are exploring the effects of acupuncture, meditation, and other therapies on pain, anxiety, cancer, arthritis, menopause, dementia, frailty, and other diseases through clinical trials and other methods. However, the mechanisms of MBT still need to be further verified to determine their effects. In addition, “prevalence, alternative medicine, and stimulation therapy” have also received considerable attention.

Using Sankey diagrams to visualize the flow of research power within this field, we analyzed the relationships between research topics, authors, and source data such as countries. Figure 5A and B examined the relationships between authors, keywords, and countries and literature, respectively. As shown in Fig. 5B, the 25 most influential authors in the field of holistic medicine flowed toward the most influential articles, indicating that core authors have tight collaborative relationships and have made outstanding contributions to holistic medicine research. The research topics flowing toward the influential articles mainly included acupuncture, meditation, yoga, tai chi, and biofeedback, with the research subjects mainly being anxiety, stress, stroke, and pain. At the same time, the Sankey diagram (Fig. 5A) showing the core authors’ flow of contributions to the field showed that the main contributing countries were China, the United States, South Korea, Germany, and Australia, with the research topics being consistent with the main research topics in the field, indicating that the research priorities and frontiers in this field are mainly driven by China and the United States.