Key research papers on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
Landmark trials, the reviews of meta-analyses, and the internet-delivered CBT literature, with search strings that handle the behavioural/behavioral spelling split.
Fordham et al. (2021) note that the majority of psychological treatment research investigates CBT, so the most useful entry points are reviews of meta-analyses: Butler et al. (2006), Hofmann et al. (2012) and, most recently, Cuijpers et al. (2023) and Fordham et al. (2021). Internet-delivered CBT is the largest strand among the most-cited works, from Spek et al. (2007) to Karyotaki et al. (2021). Always search both spellings, behavioral and behavioural.
How the literature is organised
The CBT literature is organised by condition and by delivery format far more than by theory. For each disorder there is a sequence: a treatment model, randomised trials, then meta-analyses. Fairburn, Cooper and Shafran (2003) is an example of the first step, a transdiagnostic model for eating disorders. Two large trials of the 2000s, the TADS trial (March et al., 2004) for adolescent depression and Walkup et al. (2008) for childhood anxiety, compared CBT with medication and with the combination.
Because there are so many meta-analyses, the most-cited papers are reviews of them: Butler et al. (2006) and Hofmann et al. (2012). Start there, find your condition and follow the references.
Main debates
The live questions are about comparison and mechanism. Is CBT better than other therapies or than medication, or merely as good? Cuijpers et al. (2023) address this for depression: CBT was more effective than other psychotherapies, but the difference was small and not significant in most sensitivity analyses, and it did not differ significantly from pharmacotherapy in the short term. Which components do the work? Furukawa et al. (2021) took internet CBT for depression apart to find out, and Furukawa et al. (2024) do the same for insomnia.
Where recent work is heading
Delivery is a major theme. Internet-based CBT produced overall effects equivalent to face-to-face treatment in the meta-analysis by Carlbring et al. (2018), a comparison updated by Hedman-Lagerlöf et al. (2023). The most-cited recent paper, Karyotaki et al. (2021), pooled individual patient data on guided and unguided internet CBT for depression and found both more effective than control conditions, with guided more effective than unguided. Chatbot delivery is represented by Fitzpatrick et al. (2017) and Jang et al. (2021), and CBT for insomnia in people with mental or physical comorbidities has produced several well-cited reviews.
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Per Carlbring and 4 others (2018). Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.
Cited by 1,341Open accessdoi:10.1080/16506073.2017.1401115
Most-cited papers since 2021
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
Tanja A Kuut and 19 others (2023). Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Cited by 155Open accessdoi:10.1093/cid/ciad257
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
Beth Fordham and 10 others (2021). Psychological Medicine.
Cited by 185Open accessdoi:10.1017/s0033291720005292
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 26,602 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2000 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2000
167
2001
206
2002
226
2003
231
2004
318
2005
342
2006
454
2007
466
2008
538
2009
562
2010
706
2011
724
2012
870
2013
1,044
2014
1,015
2015
1,034
2016
1,143
2017
1,250
2018
1,311
2019
1,468
2020
1,431
2021
1,504
2022
1,495
2023
1,549
2024
1,702
2025
1,941
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 373 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology24 papers
JAMA Psychiatry14 papers
Journal of Medical Internet Research14 papers
American Journal of Psychiatry13 papers
Behaviour Research and Therapy12 papers
The British Journal of Psychiatry12 papers
JAMA11 papers
Clinical Psychology Review10 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
Both spellings, any condition
"cognitive behavioural therapy" OR "cognitive behavioral therapy" OR "cognitive behaviour therapy" OR "cognitive behavior therapy" OR CBT
Internet-delivered CBT
("cognitive behavioural therapy" OR "cognitive behavioral therapy" OR CBT OR iCBT) AND (internet OR online OR digital OR (computerised OR computerized) OR app) AND (depress* OR anxiety)
CBT for insomnia
("cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia" OR "cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia" OR "CBT-I") AND ("randomised controlled trial" OR "randomized controlled trial" OR meta-analy*)
Explore cognitive behavioral therapy in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “Cognitive behaviour therapy for eating disorders: a “transdiagnostic” theory and treatment” (2003), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
Fairburn, C. G., Cooper, Z., & Shafran, R. (2003). Cognitive behaviour therapy for eating disorders: A “transdiagnostic” theory and treatment. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 41(5), 509–528. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0005-7967(02)00088-8
MLA 9th edition
Fairburn, Christopher G., et al. “Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Eating Disorders: A ‘Transdiagnostic’ Theory and Treatment.” Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol. 41, no. 5, 2003, pp. 509–28, https://doi.org/10.1016/s0005-7967(02)00088-8.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best single source on whether CBT works?
Hofmann et al. (2012), The Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Review of Meta-analyses, is the most cited overview. For current evidence on depression specifically, Cuijpers et al. (2023) in World Psychiatry compares CBT with control conditions, other psychotherapies and medication. Fordham et al. (2021) is a meta-review across all conditions and populations.
Why do I find fewer results than expected when I search for CBT?
Usually because of spelling. British and Australian journals use behavioural and behaviour; American journals use behavioral and behavior. A wildcard such as behavio?ral works in most databases; otherwise combine all four phrases with OR.
Why are the founding books on cognitive therapy missing?
This page lists works with a DOI whose title contains cognitive behavioral (or behavioural) therapy. Books without a DOI, and works titled cognitive therapy, do not appear in a title search like that. Find them through the reference lists of Butler et al. (2006) or Hofmann et al. (2012), and check each one in a library catalogue before citing it.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches ("cognitive behavioral therapy" OR "cognitive behavioural therapy" OR "cognitive behavior therapy" OR "cognitive behaviour therapy"). Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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