Research data · Disease model and test

Open field in post-traumatic stress research

From 2021 to 2025, 52 animal research papers on post-traumatic stress mentioned the open field in their title or abstract.

That is 3.7 times the 14 papers of 2011 to 2015. Between the same two periods, the papers on post-traumatic stress that mention any of the 90 tests we count grew more slowly, to 1.8 times as many.

52 papers on post-traumatic stress from 2021 to 2025 mentioned the open field
13% of the papers on post-traumatic stress that mention any test mention the open field
1% of the papers that mention the open field are on post-traumatic stress
3.7 times as many papers as in 2011 to 2015

Papers by year

Animal research papers on post-traumatic stress 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
20010
20020
20030
20041
20050
20062
20070
20080
20091
20101
20110
20122
20131
20145
20156
20164
20174
201810
20196
202012
202110
20229
20238
20247
202518
2026 (part year)18

Papers on post-traumatic stress that mention the open field fell from 10 in 2021 to 7 in 2024, then rose to 18 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 52 papers from 2021 to 2025. A paper can use more than one species, so the shares can add to more than 100%.

Species

Rat
28 papers 54%
Mouse
21 papers 40%
Other animals
2 papers 4%
Zebrafish
1 paper 2%

“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 52 papers also mention it, and what share that is. Of these papers, 1 (2%) mention no other test.

The 12 tests these papers mention most

Which papers count

A paper counts here when it is animal research, mentions the open field in its title or abstract, and studies post-traumatic stress.

We tell whether a paper studies post-traumatic stress 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 post-traumatic stress research names the subject headings we count as post-traumatic stress. 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 post-traumatic stress research ranks the tests by their papers on post-traumatic stress.

How to cite

APA

ConductScience. (2026, November 10). Open field in post-traumatic stress research [Data set]. https://conductscience.com/data/behavioral-tests/models/ptsd/open-field

BibTeX

@misc{conductscience_ptsd_open_field_2026,
  author = {{ConductScience}},
  title = {Open field in post-traumatic stress research},
  year = {2026},
  month = nov,
  url = {https://conductscience.com/data/behavioral-tests/models/ptsd/open-field},
  note = {Data set, released November 10, 2026},
}

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