Evolution and Research Trends About Emerging Adulthood: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

This article presents the evolution and recent research tendencies of emerging adulthood. For this, a bibliometric analysis was conducted of documents published in the Web of Science ( N = 5,372). The notion of emerging adulthood arose in the 1990s, and the number of documents on this topic has systematically grown since the first decade of the 2000s. Growth in this area has also been accompanied by diversification. This diversity is reflected by the number of categories that the Web of Science tags in association with each author’s country of affiliation. Following are the three large thematic clusters within this area: emerging adulthood; adolescence; and young adult. The present study was limited to documents catalogued in the Web of Science, and consideration should be given to the idiomatic biases of this indexer. A further limitation of this study is that the search for “emerging adulthood” excluded related terminology, such as “emerging adult” “young adult” and “adolescent.”