Mapping, clustering, and analysis of research in psychiatric genomics

The distribution pattern and knowledge structure of psychiatric genomics were surveyed based on literature dealing with both psychiatry and genomics/genetics. Coword analysis and bibliographic coupling of the records retrieved from Scopus and PubMed for 2016-2020 revealed the subsurface research aspects.

The data were analyzed using coword analysis and clustering methods using Sci2 and VOSviewer.

Analysis of ~3800 records showed that psychiatric genomics is, as expectedly, covered largely under biomedical subjects with a visible interest in other disciplines such as humanities and ethics. A coword analysis was done for all the years, followed by a year-wise analysis based on the keywords, and then a bibliographic coupling based on the cited references. This led to the generation of different clusters of prevalent research areas. The centrality values described the position of each component.

'Schizophrenia', 'depression', 'pharmacogenomics', and 'immunopathogenesis' were the research topics of overarching interest. 'Gut-brain axis' and 'gene-environment interaction' were the emerging topics, whereas certain topics such as 'child and adolescent psychiatry' remained priorities when compared to earlier studies. The keywords and research focus were diverse. They ranged from genetics to transcriptomics and epigenetics to proteomics of psychiatric disorders. We found a stagnation of science communication in the field with only 0.2% of the articles from the entire corpus relevant to it. The research categories identified in this study reflect the current publication and research trends in psychiatric genomics.