Background Drug therapy is one of the main treatment approaches for depression, and a consideration of patient preferences can effectively improve patient compliance with medication. Several studies have been conducted to explore the medication choice preferences of patients with depression, but there is a lack of studies to systematically collect and summarize the medication choice preferences of patients with depression. Objective To systematically review the studies related to the application of discrete choice experiment (DCE) and best-worst scaling (BWS) to the medication choice preferences of patients with depression, in order to provide reference for clinical rational drug use of patients with depression and future studies of preferences. Methods CNKI, Wanfang Data Knowledge Service Platform, VIP, PubMed, Web of Science and EmBase were systematically searched for the studies related to the application of DCE and BWS to the medication choice preferences of patients with depression from inception to 2021