The rise of artificial intelligence for cognitive behavioral therapy: A bibliometric overview.

Recent years have seen a sharply rising interest in the scientific area dedicated to the study of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) research and applications (AI4CBT for brevity). Yet, little is known about how this interest is realized and hence the overall status, prospects, and possible challenges of AI4CBT as a field (e.g. breadth of the field, key topics and methods, key producing countries/institutions/authors, interdisciplinary grounding). This paper addresses this gap by developing a broad-spectrum bibliometric analysis towards acquiring a comprehensive overview of the AI4CBT field. Four key dimensions are analyzed (productivity, producers, productions, and contents) along the array of bibliographic metrics, including production trends over time, leading contributors at various levels, co-authorship, citation, and keywords co-occurrence networks, publication formats, key venues, methodological trends, and disciplinary assessment. The paper concludes by framing the status of AI4CBT as a scientific field, allowing to tie it to scientific and applicative challenges and opportunities that AI4CBT may encounter and offer as it further develops.