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Wheel running in anxiety research

From 2021 to 2025, 60 animal research papers on anxiety mentioned wheel running in their title or abstract.

That is 1.6 times the 37 papers of 2011 to 2015. Between the same two periods, the papers on anxiety that mention any of the 90 tests we count grew more slowly, to 1.3 times as many.

60 papers on anxiety from 2021 to 2025 mentioned wheel running
2% of the papers on anxiety that mention any test mention wheel running
6% of the papers that mention wheel running are on anxiety
1.6 times as many papers as in 2011 to 2015

Papers by year

Animal research papers on anxiety that mention wheel running, 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
20030
20040
20051
20061
20072
20087
20097
20106
20112
20129
201311
20146
20159
20169
201711
201810
20199
202014
202111
202217
20237
202410
202515
2026 (part year)6

Papers on anxiety that mention wheel running fell from 11 in 2021 to 7 in 2023, then rose to 15 in 2025. Part of this dip may come from PubMed's indexing rather than from fewer studies. Where PubMed has indexed a paper, we take its disease models from that indexing. Otherwise PubTator 3, NCBI's text-mining service, has to find the disease in the title or abstract, or the paper is not counted here. Papers that PubMed indexed under the subject heading Animals also fell and rose, from 200,221 in 2021 to 156,447 in 2023 and 235,479 in 2025.

Which species the papers used

Each bar is a share of the 60 papers from 2021 to 2025. A paper can use more than one species, so the shares can add to more than 100%.

Species

Mouse
41 papers 68%
Rat
19 papers 32%

Tests mentioned alongside wheel running

Each bar is one test, with how many of the 60 papers also mention it, and what share that is. Of these papers, 22 (37%) mention no other test.

The 12 tests these papers mention most

23 papers 38%
12 papers 20%
7 papers 12%
3 papers 5%
3 papers 5%
2 papers 3%
2 papers 3%
2 papers 3%

Which papers count

A paper counts here when it is animal research, mentions wheel running in its title or abstract, and studies anxiety.

We tell whether a paper studies anxiety from its MeSH terms, the subject headings the National Library of Medicine adds when it indexes a paper. For a paper without MeSH terms, PubTator 3, NCBI's text-mining service, has to find the disease in the title or abstract. A paper can count under more than one disease model. A paper that mentions the test only in its methods is missed, so the count runs low.

The page on anxiety research names the subject headings we count as anxiety. Download the test list for the search terms we used for wheel running, or the paper list for the PubMed ID of every paper behind these counts. Our main page, Behavioral tests in published research, has the full method and each source's terms of use.

More tests and disease models

Every pairing of a disease model and a test with 30 or more papers from 2021 to 2025 has a page like this one.

The page on wheel running counts all the papers that mention it, whatever they study. The page on anxiety research ranks the tests by their papers on anxiety.

How to cite

APA

ConductScience. (2026, November 10). Wheel running in anxiety research [Data set]. https://conductscience.com/data/behavioral-tests/models/anxiety/running-wheel

BibTeX

@misc{conductscience_anxiety_running_wheel_2026,
  author = {{ConductScience}},
  title = {Wheel running in anxiety research},
  year = {2026},
  month = nov,
  url = {https://conductscience.com/data/behavioral-tests/models/anxiety/running-wheel},
  note = {Data set, released November 10, 2026},
}

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