Bibliometric analysis of “Post-Traumatic Stress†in the Psychology Literature

Abstract

The objective of this study is to determine the papers published on “post-traumatic stress†in psychology literature and to analyse the characteristics of these papers. The researcher listed all the papers published on “post-traumatic stress†topic in psychology literature without a time limit by searching the Social Sciences Citation Index database. Web of Science categories were restricted to "psychology", "psychology clinical", "psychology educational", "psychology multidisciplinary", “psychology developmentalâ€, “behavioural sciencesâ€, “psychology socialâ€, “psychology experimentalâ€, “psychology appliedâ€, “psychology biologicalâ€, and “psychology psychoanalysisâ€. These papers were reviewed by the researcher according to a few criteria such as citations, organizations, article types, authors, country of origin, journal titles, and research areas. There are total of 2366 publications that were retrieved and reviewed on “post-traumatic stress†topic in psychology literaturebetween 2000 and 2018. Each year has a different number of publications. However, the sum of the citations received by those publications increases each year regularly. In this paper, there are 94 articles cited more than h-index (94) and top ten of those 94h-classics are reported. “Psychological Medicine†and “European Journal of Psychotraumatology†are the most prolific journals in the “post-traumatic stress†literature. Also, the most important countries in the psychology literature on the topic of “post-traumatic stress†are the USA, England, Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands. The number of publications on the topic of “posttraumatic stress†in the psychology literature increased meaningfully at the last twelve years and the number of citations received by those publications in this field increased each year regularly. The findings of this study show that “post-traumatic stress†topic attracts more attention of the researchers working in the disciplines related to psychology.

Keywords

Post-traumatic stress, bibliometric analysis, citation analysis.