Research data ยท Home-cage behavior

Burrowing

From 2021 to 2025, 40 animal research papers mentioned burrowing in their title or abstract, ranking it 70th of the 90 tests we track.

That is 1.7 times the 23 papers of 2011 to 2015. Papers that mention any of the 90 tests grew to 1.2 times as many over the same span.

40 animal research papers from 2021 to 2025 mentioned the test
1.7 times as many papers as in 2011 to 2015
70th of the 90 tests by papers from 2021 to 2025
65% of these papers used mice and 23% used rats

Papers by year

Animal research papers that mention burrowing, by year, 2001 to 2026

The 2026 bar counts papers added to PubMed by November 8, 2026.

  • Papers in a full year
  • 2026 so far
Show the counts for each year
Papers by year
YearPapers
20010
20020
20031
20040
20050
20061
20070
20081
20093
20102
20114
20124
20134
20145
20156
20167
20177
20188
20198
202010
20216
202214
20238
20246
20256
2026 (part year)1

Papers that mention burrowing in mice and in rats, by year, 2001 to 2025

  • Mouse
  • Rat
Show the counts for each year and species
Papers by year, mice and rats
YearMouseRat
200100
200200
200300
200400
200500
200611
200700
200810
200931
201011
201110
201231
201311
201433
201522
201615
201741
201844
201935
202091
202141
202293
202334
202450
202551

Which species the papers used

Each bar is a share of the 40 papers from 2021 to 2025. A paper can use more than one species, so the shares can add to more than 100%.

Species

Mouse
26 papers 65%
Rat
9 papers 23%
Other animals
7 papers 18%

โ€œOther animalsโ€ counts papers that use none of the other species in this chart.

Strains and genetic lines

Strain names come from the MeSH terms PubMed adds when it indexes a paper. PubMed has indexed 29 of the 40 papers, so each bar is a share of those 29.

C57BL mice
8 papers 28%
Sprague-Dawley rats
3 papers 10%
BALB/c mice
2 papers 7%
Wistar rats
1 paper 3%
ICR mice
1 paper 3%
Transgenic mice
1 paper 3%
NOD mice
1 paper 3%

A paper indexed under two of these headings, such as knockout mice and a strain, counts under both.

Disease models these papers study

Each bar counts the papers from 2021 to 2025 that mention burrowing and study that disease model, with its share of the 40 papers. The model comes from a paper's MeSH terms. For a paper PubMed has not indexed, it comes from PubTator 3, NCBI's text-mining service, when that service finds the disease in the title or abstract. A paper can count under more than one model.

Papers from 2021 to 2025 by disease model

Tests mentioned alongside burrowing

Each bar counts the papers from 2021 to 2025 that mention both tests, with its share of the 40 papers that mention burrowing.

Papers from 2021 to 2025 that mention both tests

6 papers 15%
4 papers 10%
4 papers 10%
2 papers 5%
2 papers 5%

The most cited papers from 2021 to 2025

These papers from 2021 to 2025 mention burrowing and have the most citations, as counted by NIH's iCite on November 5, 2026.

  1. Endometriosis leads to central nervous system-wide glial activation in a mouse model of endometriosis.

    J Neuroinflammation, 2023. 43 citations.

  2. Behavioral outcomes of complete Freund adjuvant-induced inflammatory pain in the rodent hind paw: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

    Pain, 2022. 38 citations.

  3. Development of behavioral patterns in young C57BL/6J mice: a home cage-based study.

    Sci Rep, 2022. 26 citations.

  4. cis-Regulatory changes in locomotor genes are associated with the evolution of burrowing behavior.

    Cell Rep, 2022. 21 citations.

  5. Delivery of Nematicides Using TMGMV-Derived Spherical Nanoparticles.

    Nano Lett, 2023. 20 citations.

How we counted

A count is the number of animal research papers whose title or abstract mentions one of the test's search terms. It is not a count of experiments, labs or animals.

A paper that mentions burrowing only in its methods is missed, so the count runs low. The count includes 2 reviews. For 11 of the 40 papers, PubMed's indexing gave no species, so the species came from PubTator 3 finding one in the title or abstract.

The test's search terms are in the test list download. The full method, with each source and its terms of use, is on our main page, Behavioral tests in published research.

More home-cage behavior tests

These home-cage behavior tests also have a page, with their papers from 2021 to 2025. Each test with 30 or more papers gets one.

How to cite

APA

ConductScience. (2026, November 10). Burrowing in published research [Data set]. https://conductscience.com/data/behavioral-tests/burrowing

BibTeX

@misc{conductscience_burrowing_2026,
  author = {{ConductScience}},
  title = {Burrowing in published research},
  year = {2026},
  month = nov,
  url = {https://conductscience.com/data/behavioral-tests/burrowing},
  note = {Data set, released November 10, 2026},
}