Research data · Disease model and test

Open field in cognitive impairment and dementia research

From 2021 to 2025, 493 animal research papers on cognitive impairment and dementia mentioned the open field in their title or abstract.

That is 3.3 times the 149 papers of 2011 to 2015. Between the same two periods, the papers on cognitive impairment and dementia that mention any of the 90 tests we count grew more slowly, to 1.7 times as many.

493 papers on cognitive impairment and dementia from 2021 to 2025 mentioned the open field
10% of the papers on cognitive impairment and dementia that mention any test mention the open field
12% of the papers that mention the open field are on cognitive impairment and dementia
3.3 times as many papers as in 2011 to 2015

Papers by year

Animal research papers on cognitive impairment and dementia that mention the open field, 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
20014
20024
20034
20047
20054
200610
20078
20089
200921
201013
201118
201220
201333
201441
201537
201653
201760
201851
201962
202071
202171
202279
202391
2024115
2025137
2026 (part year)123

Which species the papers used

Each bar is a share of the 493 papers from 2021 to 2025. A paper can use more than one species, so the shares can add to more than 100%.

Species

Mouse
295 papers 60%
Rat
204 papers 41%
Other animals
3 papers 1%
Zebrafish
1 paper under 1%
Fruit fly
1 paper under 1%

“Other animals” counts papers that use none of the species this chart names.

Tests mentioned alongside the open field

Each bar is one test, with how many of the 493 papers also mention it, and what share that is. Of these papers, 24 (5%) mention no other test.

The 12 tests these papers mention most

236 papers 48%
105 papers 21%
104 papers 21%
51 papers 10%
35 papers 7%
32 papers 6%
27 papers 5%
18 papers 4%
17 papers 3%

Which papers count

A paper counts here when it is animal research, mentions the open field in its title or abstract, and studies cognitive impairment and dementia.

We tell whether a paper studies cognitive impairment and dementia 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 cognitive impairment and dementia research names the subject headings we count as cognitive impairment and dementia. Download the test list for the search terms we used for the open field, 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 the open field counts all the papers that mention it, whatever they study. The page on cognitive impairment and dementia research ranks the tests by their papers on cognitive impairment and dementia.

How to cite

APA

ConductScience. (2026, November 10). Open field in cognitive impairment and dementia research [Data set]. https://conductscience.com/data/behavioral-tests/models/cognitive-impairment/open-field

BibTeX

@misc{conductscience_cognitive_impairment_open_field_2026,
  author = {{ConductScience}},
  title = {Open field in cognitive impairment and dementia research},
  year = {2026},
  month = nov,
  url = {https://conductscience.com/data/behavioral-tests/models/cognitive-impairment/open-field},
  note = {Data set, released November 10, 2026},
}

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