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Gaslighting was the most-read psychology topic on Wikipedia, but PubMed lists just 98 papers on it in a decade
Comparing Wikipedia views with PubMed paper counts for 27 psychology topics from 2016 to 2025, gaslighting drew 27.9 million views but only 98 research papers, while burnout had 23,541 papers and 1.9 million views.
Gaslighting was the most-read of 27 psychology topics on English Wikipedia from 2016 to 2025, with 27,884,837 views. Over the same ten years, PubMed lists just 98 papers that use the word in their title or abstract.
That is about 284,539 Wikipedia views for every research paper. We built this comparison ourselves by setting public interest (Wikipedia pageviews) against research output (PubMed paper counts) for each topic. It shows where public attention has run ahead of science, and where science is busy on topics the public reads less about.
The three headline findings
- Gaslighting draws the most readers but little research: 27,884,837 views against 98 papers. Limerence (5 papers) and Stockholm syndrome (18 papers) have even wider gaps.
- Burnout is the reverse: 23,541 papers against 1,867,168 views, or 79 views per paper. Loneliness (141 per paper) and mindfulness (316) are also heavily studied relative to how much they are read.
- Research is catching up on the popular topics. PubMed papers mentioning gaslighting rose from 1 in 2015 to 47 in 2025. Impostor syndrome went from 2 to 147, and loneliness from 446 to 2,927.
Public interest vs research, 27 topics, 2016 to 2025
| Topic | Wikipedia views | PubMed papers | Views per paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Limerence | 6,538,375 | 5 | 1,307,675 |
| Stockholm syndrome | 15,847,631 | 18 | 880,424 |
| Gaslighting | 27,884,837 | 98 | 284,539 |
| Dunning-Kruger effect | 25,253,605 | 90 | 280,596 |
| Myers-Briggs Type Indicator | 21,904,596 | 132 | 165,944 |
| Maslow’s hierarchy of needs | 21,517,535 | 234 | 91,955 |
| Impostor syndrome | 11,835,569 | 525 | 22,544 |
| Cognitive dissonance | 10,370,363 | 546 | 18,993 |
| Confirmation bias | 6,447,951 | 461 | 13,987 |
| Dark triad | 5,027,838 | 538 | 9,345 |
| Codependency | 4,729,347 | 520 | 9,095 |
| Highly sensitive person | 1,759,988 | 214 | 8,224 |
| Flow (psychology) | 5,523,884 | 701 | 7,880 |
| Seasonal affective disorder | 2,658,766 | 340 | 7,820 |
| Narcissism | 17,202,292 | 2,236 | 7,693 |
| Learned helplessness | 3,093,924 | 441 | 7,016 |
| Borderline personality disorder | 26,471,465 | 4,919 | 5,381 |
| Psychopathy | 12,570,747 | 2,388 | 5,264 |
| Procrastination | 4,239,792 | 946 | 4,482 |
| Attachment theory | 6,126,620 | 2,527 | 2,424 |
| Emotional intelligence | 8,037,881 | 3,483 | 2,308 |
| Introversion and extraversion | 4,027,817 | 3,917 | 1,028 |
| ADHD | 16,527,082 | 26,548 | 623 |
| Rumination | 2,088,212 | 5,367 | 389 |
| Mindfulness | 4,871,430 | 15,440 | 316 |
| Loneliness | 1,994,108 | 14,141 | 141 |
| Burnout | 1,867,168 | 23,541 | 79 |
Papers per year, seven topics
| Topic | 2015 | 2020 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Narcissism | 163 | 271 | 360 |
| ADHD | 2,441 | 3,121 | 4,166 |
| Impostor syndrome | 2 | 50 | 147 |
| Burnout | 785 | 2,607 | 4,539 |
| Gaslighting | 1 | 2 | 47 |
| Mindfulness | 807 | 1,677 | 2,821 |
| Loneliness | 446 | 1,417 | 2,927 |
Download the data (CSV) and the papers per year (CSV)
What stands out
The most-read topics after gaslighting were borderline personality disorder (26,471,465 views) and the Dunning-Kruger effect (25,253,605). Borderline personality disorder is also well studied, with 4,919 papers. The Dunning-Kruger effect is not: 90 papers name it.
Popular personality frameworks show the same pattern. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator drew 21,904,596 views and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 21,517,535, against 132 and 234 papers.
ADHD sits in a category of its own. It is the most-researched topic in our set, with 26,548 papers, and also one of the most read, with 16,527,082 views. Burnout research grew almost sixfold, from 785 papers in 2015 to 4,539 in 2025.
How we got these numbers
- Public interest: Wikimedia Pageviews API, endpoint
/metrics/pageviews/per-article/en.wikipedia/all-access/user/<article>/monthly/2016010100/2026093000, summed over calendar years 2016 to 2025. One article per topic; redirects were resolved to the main article. - Research output: NCBI E-utilities (esearch) for PubMed, endpoint
esearch.fcgi?db=pubmed&term=<query>&rettype=countwithdatetype=pdatand publication years 2016 to 2025, or single years for the trend table. Each query searches titles and abstracts ([tiab]); the exact query for every topic is in the CSV. - Retrieved: 31 October 2026.
- Dropped: psychological resilience, because the word resilience is used heavily in ecology, engineering and medicine, so its paper count would not reflect psychology research.
- Limitations: a title and abstract search misses papers that use other words for the same idea, and catches some that mention a term only in passing. PubMed covers biomedicine and much of psychology but not every social science journal. Wikipedia views measure curiosity, not importance. Views per paper is a rough indicator of a gap, not a precise measure.