Background

We aim to address issues and limitations typical for traditional, narrative reviews of well-being by using bibliometric methodologies to map the field of well-being research on an unprecedented grand scale.

Aims

With over 30,000 primary documents from Web of Science, we leverage three bibliometric methods to capture a macro-view of the past, present, and future of psychological research on well-being.

Research questions: (1) what does the history of well-being research look like, and how have ideas been passed down over time? (2) what is the anatomy (i.e., structure) of the scientific community in the field of well-being research? and (3) what are the prominent and emerging topics of study going into the future of well-being research?  

Method

Study 1 (Historiography): Past-focused bibliometric method that maps and traces the flow of knowledge in a research field by looking at important primary documents citing other primary documents. CitNetExplorer (van Eck & Waltman, 2014a). Sample = 34,441 primary documents.  

Study 2: (Co-Citation): Past-to-present focused bibliometric method, which focuses on the secondary documents' references list obtained from primary documents. It is assumed that the more two secondary documents are cited together, the more likely that they (the dyad) are related to each other. VOSviewer version 1.6.18 (van Eck & Waltman, 2014b 2022) was used. Sample = 36,680 primary documents & 87,192 secondary documents.

Study 3: (Bibliographic Coupling): Present-future focused method simultaneously investigates primary and secondary documents to assess if at least one reference is shared between two primary documents (and thus defined as a secondary document). VoSviewer was also used to analyze the same documents from Study 2.

Results

Science maps reveal the (1) past of well-being and how ideas have been passed down, (2) present underlying structure of the intellectual field, and the (3) future of the field and emergent topics through.

Conclusion

An integrated discussion of the three studies and future directions for the entire field of well-being research are presented.