For each year since 1999, two literature searches were conducted using PubMed: the total number of abstracts containing the terms “fMRI”, “functional MRI”, or “functional magnetic resonance” (y-axis), and the number of abstracts within that set that also included the term “event related” (x-axis). The number of research articles that describe fMRI research has increased every year since 1999, with a mean year-over-year increase of about 20%. In contrast, the number of those abstracts that also label their research as “event-related” has actually declined over the past five years. This reflects the ubiquity of event-related designs, which are now sufficiently well accepted that they less likely to be noted within research abstracts.