Ten Year Literature on Psychological and Behavioral Interventions Against Cancer: a Terms Analysis

We here performed a systematic review of PBIC literature using terms analysis in a hope of both identifyingpotential trends and patterns and exploring methods leveraging traditional literature reviews in this specificarea. Articles meeting inclusion criteria were retrieved from PUBMED and translated into dichotomized articlerecords representing presence or non-presence of MeSH terms and a metric consisting of numbers of times of cooccurrencebetween all pairs of terms identified using a self-designed program. The occurrence of and relationsamong the terms were calculated and visualized using Excel2007 and UCINET respectively. A total of 1,742terms were identified from 997 articles retrieved. Put in a descending order, the lines representing the times ofterm occurrence formed a typical hyperbolic curve; when plotted along the x-axis of whole MESH terms, thelines clustered within four specific regions. Comparison of term occurrence between 2002 and 2011 revealedpriority changes in population and subjects (from general groups to priority groups), intervention approaches(from medicine to exercise and psychotherapy), methodology and techniques (from cohort studies to randomizedcontrolled trials) and outcomes (from health and mental health to quality of life, depression etc.). Networks ofthe terms featured a number of closely linked groups of topics including method and questionnaires, therapy andoutcomes, survival management, psychological assessment and intervention, behavioral intervention (individualand community oriented). Terms analysis revealed interesting trends and patterns about PBIC publications andboth the analysis methods and findings have implications for future research and literature reviews.