Background Various instruments for patient screening and diagnosis have been developed for and applied in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Objective This study comprehensively investigates the prevalence and temporal trends of the most widely used instruments in PTSD-related studies. Methods A total of 1345 files of registered clinical trials from ClinicalTrials.gov and 9422 abstracts from the PubMed database from 2005 to 2020 were downloaded for this study. The instruments applied in clinical trials were manually annotated, and instruments in abstracts were recognized using exact string matching. The prevalence score of an instrument in a certain period was calculated as the number of studies divided by the number of instances of the instrument. By calculating the yearly prevalence index of each instrument, we conducted a trends analysis and compared the trends in index change between instruments. Results A total of 4178 instrument synonyms were annotated, which were mapped to 1423 unique instruments. In the 16 years from 2005 to 2020, only 10 instruments were used more than once per year; the 4 most used instruments were the PTSD Checklist, the Clinician-Administered PTSD Disorder Scale, the Patient Health Questionnaire, and the Beck Depression Inventory. There were 18 instruments whose yearly prevalence index score exceeded 0.1 at least once during the 16 years. The changes in trends and time points of partial instruments in clinical trials and PubMed abstracts were highly consistent. The average time duration of a PTSD-related trial was 1495.5 days or approximately 4 years from submission to ClinicalTrial.gov to publication in a journal. Conclusions The application of widely accepted and appropriate instruments can help improve the reliability of research results in PTSD-related clinical studies. With extensive text data obtained from real clinical trials and published articles, we investigated and compared the usage of instruments in the PTSD research community.

BACKGROUND Various instruments have been developed and applied in posttraumatic stress disorders (PTSD) for patients screening and diagnosis. OBJECTIVE The study comprehensively investigates prevalence and temporal trends of the majority instruments used in PTSD related studies. METHODS A total of 1345 clinical trials registered files from ClinicalTrials.gov and 9422 abstracts from PubMed database ranging from year 2005 to year 2020 were downloaded for this study. The instruments applied in clinical trials were manually annotated, and instruments in abstracts were recognized with exact string matching. The prevalence score of one instrument in a certain period is calculated as the number of studies divided by the number of appearance of the instrument. With the yearly prevalence index of each instrument calculated, we conducted a trends analysis and compared the index change trends between instruments. RESULTS A total of 4178 instrument synonyms were annotated, which were mapped to 1423 unique instruments. In the 16 years from 2005 to 2020, only 10 instruments were used more than once per year, the top 4 most used instruments were PTSD Checklist (PCL), Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS), Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). There were 18 instruments whose yearly prevalence index score exceeded 0.1 at least once during the 16 years. The changes in trends and time points of partial instruments in clinical trials and PubMed abstracts are highly consistent. The average time duration of a PTSD related trial was 1495.5 days or approximately 4 years from submission to Clinicaltrial.gov to publishment on journal. CONCLUSIONS The application of widely accepted and appropriate instruments can help improve the reliability of research results in PTSD clinical studies. With the broad text data from real clinical trials and published articles, we investigated and compared the usage of instruments in PTSD research community. We make the resource of this study available on http://bmtongji.cn:1236/scale/index.