Abstract:  The purpose of this paper is to report the foci and trends of U.S. research on children and adolescents who had treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the last decade (2006~2016). We employed Bicomb 2.0 and IBM SPSS Statistics 20.0 software to do a knowledge-mapping analysis of 363 U.S. journal articles retrieved from ISI Web of Science Database using the key words “PTSD or posttraumatic stress disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder”, “treatment or therapy or prevention or cure”, and “children or teenagers or adolescents or students or pupils or youth”. Analyses revealed that the studies could be divided into two fields. The first field is psychiatric and neurobiological treatment which includes two research foci: psychiatric treatment and neurobiological treatment (e.g. eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). The second field is psychological treatment which also includes two research foci: psychological treatment research on the PTSD caused by domestic violence; and cognitive behavior treatment research. Cognitive behavior treatment is the key focus in current studies on children’s and adolescents’ PTSD. However, there are few studies on the effects of children’s and adolescents’ PTSD treatments. Further studies should pay more attention to longitudinal research on treatments of children and adolescents with PTSD, and the effects of psychological treatment combined with medication.

Key words:  Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), treatment, Knowledge-Mapping, information visualization, children and adolescents