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Objective: Depression is a chronic disorder that affects a considerable population worldwide. Exercise has been proposed as an effective adjunct for depression. Although there has been a significant amount of research on exercise for depression, there is a lack of reviews analyzing current state and frontier of the research. This study aims to identify current hot topics and tendencies in the field of exercise for depression. Methods: Articles and reviews on the topic of exercise for depression published in English between January 2010 and December 2023 were screened from the Web of Science Core Collection. The qualified records were evaluated quantitatively and visualized using CiteSpace software. The analysis contains information on authors, institutions, journals, publications, and countries/regions, as well as subject categories and keywords. Results: A total of 2405 records were analyzed. The number of related publications has been growing rapidly from 2010 to 2023. The Journal of Affective Disorders published the most articles (n = 137). The USA leads in terms of the number of publications (n = 684) and citations (n =19688). The most productive institution and author were King's College London (n = 69) and Stubbs B (n = 31), respectively. Psychiatry (n = 783) was definitely the first research hotspot category. The keywords analysis revealed that the group of interest was older adults, and the form of exercise of interest was Hatha yoga in the area. Conclusion: The topic of exercise for depression is an expanding field of research, with the expectation that it will remain a focus of investigation. The findings of our study indicate the key areas and potential avenues for further investigation in this field. More research is required to investigate potential mechanisms of exercise and to develop more personalized exercise prescriptions in order to effectively improve depression in specific populations.
Wang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.