A Panorama of Human–Animal Interactions Research: Bibliometric Analysis of HAI Articles 1982–2018

ABSTRACT

What can we know about human–animal interactions (HAI) research by looking at information about its research articles, such as publication information, text of abstracts or author keywords, or citation patterns? Bibliometric analysis, the quantification of information about published articles, is a tool we can use to gain a perspective of the status of research in a particular field. In this study, information about four decades of HAI research publications was obtained from the multidisciplinary research database Web of Science Core Collection, and analyzed to look for informative patterns about this body of research using Microsoft Excel and VantagePoint text mining software. The data set of 1,715 articles included first reports of research and review articles published between 1982 and 2018. Analyses reveal that there has been steady growth of HAI research publications, in terms of both annual number of articles published and distinct journal titles publishing these articles, with these numbers climbing more sharply in recent years. HAI research is very collaborative, and many countries are represented through author affiliations, although most of the research is written in English. Veterinary medicine/science and psychology/psychiatry were the top departments found in author affiliations. The animals mentioned in the research cover house pets, horses, livestock, and wild animals. Moreover, there is evidence that external funding for HAI research is slowly increasing. In short, a bibliometric analysis of HAI publications found through Web of Science Core Collection provides a panorama of this growing field of research.

KEYWORDS:

• Bibliometric analysis
• bibliometrics
• human–animal interaction
• text analytics

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Dr Alan M. Beck and Dr Jean-Pierre V. M. Hérubel for their thoughtful and constructive comments on this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

The author reports no conflict of interest, financial, or otherwise.