Human Flourishing
Bibliometric Interactive Tool
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Data
The current study was performed over a data collection extracted from the academic citation database Scopus in January 2022. A total of 1930 documents were obtained directly from the platform using institutional access. The documents were not filtered by type or any other aspect, so all item which reply to the query "human flourishing" (in title, abstract or keywords) OR "flourishing" (just as keyword) in Scopus is present within the sample. The results are included in a period of more than 50 years, from 1969 to 2021, with 1200 different academic sources and 3312 different authors who employ 4980 different keywords collaborating with a mean of 1.72 authors per document.
Table 1.1. Dataset summary compiled from Scopus replying to the query "human flourishing" (in title, abstract or keywords) OR "flourishing" (just as keyword) in January 2022 and without any filter.
Programming Tools
The study was developed using programming tools to explore and compute the data. Mainly, the analysis was performed using R programming employing the following packages:
tidyverse R package (Wickham, 2021): to manage and visualize most of the data.
widyr R Package (Robinson, 2020): to perform some specific analysis, particularly the correlations between keywords.
bibliometrix R package (Aria & Cucurullo, 2021): a very powerful package which was very useful for many analysis and visualizations.
plotly R package (Sievert et al., 2021): to deploy the interactive versions of many plots.
tidytext R package (Robinson & Silge, 2020): to manage and explore text in a tidy format.
In addition, to produce the networks of relationships (the case of the author network as well as the semantic co-occurrence analysis), the data was captured with R and then exported to Gephi software (Bastian & Ramos Ibañez, 2017) in order to visualize it. Also, it it was very useful the Sigma js Plugin supported by Gephi, which allows to visualize the networks interactively by genereting a JavaScript folder. The folder was finally uploaded to github following Volodymyr Miz (2020) recommendations. You can find the resulting code at the github repository.
Cleaning and preparation
To perform the study, some operations were applied in order to improve the analysis. Most of them were specifically explained in each plot or analysis; however, it is worth to previously point out some decisions. First of all, it should be noted that to compute the keywords, the Author's Keywords (DE) variable was preferred. That's because it is usually more consistent with what the author wants to express, and even it provides a broader and more varied vocabulary not restricted to predetermined categories.
Furthermore, the blibliometrix R package gives the possibility of running Porter stemming over the keywords. That is very useful to obtain common keywords, avoiding the small divergences that each author can produce employing variations of a common concept. Nevertheless, Porter stemmization was not always enough and sometimes was necessary to perform some modifications manually. The criteria was to select the most synthetic expression, in order to better improve management and visualizations. It is important to make a record of them -the first one was always substituted by the second one-:
Human Flourishing → Flourishing
Wellbeing → Well-being
Eudaimonism → Eudaimonia
Capabilities Approach → Capabilities
Thomas Aquinas → Aquinas
Martha Nussbaum → Nussbaum
Previous Works
Dominko, M., & Verbič, M. (2019). The Economics of Subjective Well-Being: A Bibliometric Analysis. Journal of Happiness Studies, 20(6), 1973–1994. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-018-0022-z
Their search is a combination of keywords: subjective well-being, happiness, life satisfaction and positive affect on the Web of Science, and limited to the field of business and economics, obtaining a database of 2939 articles published in the period from 1915 to 2016. They found a big leap in subjective well-being research after the global financial crisis in 2008, when scholars started to question the approach to well-being of standard economic theory.
The paper performs an specific search of flourishing at work, using the query (((“flourishing*”) AND (“workplace*” OR “at work” OR “work environment*” OR “work*”))) in Scopus and Web of Science; however, after a process of selection, the authors finally worked just with 126 documents. As a result, the paper confirms an incremental use of the term flourishing applied to work, detecting 3 clusters of co-citation authors: a central one identified with Diener and Fredrickson; a second one, characterized by Keyes and Ryff; and a third one, a smaller cluster that includes Di Fabio. The paper also provides a word cloud and a keyword map, where the conceptual relationships are synthesized. They conclude the review with some suggestions for future research.
Fabricio, A., Kaczam, F., Obregon, S. L., de Almeida, D. M., Lopes, L. F. D., da Veiga, C. P., & da Silva, W. V. (2020). Quality of life: Flourishing in the work context. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01203-3
Rusk, R. D., & Waters, L. E. (2013). Tracing the size, reach, impact, and breadth of positive psychology. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(3), 207–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.777766
The authors used over 1.7 million documents of 700 journals, covering fields such as psychology, sychiatry, neuroscience, management, business, public health, and sport, to be analyzed semantically and bibliographically. Results indicate that Positive Psychology covers many different research topics from a diverse range of disciplines, and that it has been growing rapidly in significance, providing over the 4% of documents published in these areas in 2011, close to the median established by Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports.