Gratitude research: Review and future agenda using bibliometric analysis of the studies published in the last 20 years

Abstract

Although there is an exponential rise in the literature on gratitude research, there is no attempt to systematically identify the historical development and recent trends in gratitude research. Gratitude has been defined diversely as an emotion, an attitude, a moral virtue, a habit, a personality trait or a coping response. As an emotion, people experience gratitude when they receive something valuable from someone else. As a trait, it is defined as a tendency to recognise and respond to goodness in others. The present study uses bibliometric analysis to review gratitude publications from the last 20 years, that is from 2001 to September 2023. WoS (Web of Science) identified 2982 publications referring to gratitude in title, abstract or keywords. It comprised 2860 articles and 122 review papers. The extracted data were analysed and visualised with the help of two analytical tools, that is the WoS analysis and VOSviewer (version 1.6.16). This study elicits the number of publications and citations from 2001 to September 2023, and most cited publications, and the most influential authors, articles, publishers, universities and countries as performance analysis. Furthermore, collaboration among countries, keyword co‐occurrence and recent trend analysis are employed through science mapping. The results reveal that the major research areas of gratitude research are psychology, social sciences, business economics, psychiatry and public environmental and occupational health. The keywords co‐occurrence suggest five major research clusters: evolutionary studies of gratitude, gratitude and health, gratitude and positive psychology, gratitude among children and adolescent and mediating and moderating studies of gratitude. Also, the analysis of recent 5‐year studies highlights a clear trend of scientific explorations of gratitude against earlier trends of articles on philosophical and religious connotations of gratitude.