POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS AND POSTTRAUMATIC GROWTH: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF RESEARCH TRENDS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35631/IJEPC.1162039Keywords:
Posttraumatic Stress, Posttraumatic Growth, Trauma, Resilience, TrendsAbstract
The body of literature on posttraumatic stress and Posttraumatic Growth (PTG) has grown significantly within recent decades due to the growing interest of scholars in both negative and positive psychological outcomes of being exposed to traumatic events. With the ever-increasing volume of publications, it has become increasingly challenging to trace changing fashions, identify contributory forces, and chart the development of themes in the field as a whole. In order to overcome this issue, the current research conducts an extensive bibliometric search of international research on posttraumatic stress and PTG. The search strategy employed was an advanced search of the Scopus database, which retrieved 996 relevant documents as of the time the data were extracted. Publication trajectories, document categories, source outlets, authorship characteristics and national productivity, along with citation performance, were assessed with the help of Scopus Analyzer. To increase the reliability of the data, the cleaning, standardization, and harmonization of bibliographic data were supported by OpenRefine, especially when it comes to the identities of the authors, institutional affiliation, and consistency of the keywords. The bibliometric networks were then created by VOSviewer, which allows visualization of international co-authorship networks, source co-citation networks, and keyword co-occurrence networks that display hegemonic collaborations and intellectual clusters. The results indicate a steadily increasing tendency in production, and the production and cited impact of the United States, the United Kingdom, and China are the main ones. The keywords also reveal that PTG is directly related to trauma, PTSD, resilience, coping, and social support, which indicates an integrative framework between psychological distress and adaptive transformation. In general, this research provides a systematic review of the knowledge architecture that can guide current trauma studies and shape future theoretical and empirical applications.
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