The Scholarly Terrain of the Study of Love: A Bibliometric Methods Approach

Love is a quintessential aspect of the human experience. Investigating the literature on love in psychological science is messy and convoluted. A comprehensive overview of the field and its future trajectories is needed to gain insight into how psychological research on love has progressed over time and what needs to be addressed. Previous reviews on love tend to have limited scope or contain subjective inferences about the state of research on the construct of love, resulting in fragmented insights and a lack of a comprehensive scientific view of love. To address this limitation, we used bibliometric methods to map the intellectual structure of the entire field of well-being science and provide a more comprehensive view of the research. We used a database of over 9,000 primary documents downloaded from Web of Science and leveraged two bibliometric methods: historiography and bibliographic coupling. The findings shed light on (1) the evolution of love science over time and (2) the current story and emerging topics in the field.