Abstract
This article analyzes “happiness studies” as an emerging field of inquiry throughout various scientific disciplines and research areas. Utilizing four operationalized search terms in the Web of Science; “happiness”, “subjective well-being”, “life satisfaction” and “positive affect”, a dataset was created for empirical citation analysis. Combined with qualitative interpretations of the publications, our results show how happiness studies has developed over time, in what journals the citing papers have been published, and which authors and researchers are the most productive within this set. We also trace various trends in happiness studies, such as the social indicators movement, the introduction of positive psychology and various medical and clinical applications of happiness studies. We conclude that “happiness studies” has emerged in many different disciplinary contexts and progressively been integrated and standardized. Moreover, beginning at the turn of the millennium, happiness studies has even begun to shape an autonomous field of inquiry, in which happiness becomes a key research problem for itself. Thus, rather than speaking of a distinct “happiness turn”, our study shows that there have been many heterogeneous turns to happiness, departing in a number of different disciplines.
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Notes
Additional visualizations for this article can be viewed at http://scientometrics.flov.gu.se/happiness/scientometrics/ and the data is archived at the Swedish National Data Service, http://snd.gu.se/en.
For the period 1904–1959, see additional online material at http://scientometrics.flov.gu.se/happiness/scientometrics/.
For details, see http://wokinfo.com/essays/journal-selection-process/.
For additional visualizations of co-citation analyses of individual publications, see additional material at http://data.thehappysociety.net/scientometrics/.
See all publications for Social Indicators Research at http://scientometrics.flov.gu.se/happiness/ALL/so/4198.html.
Andrews and Withey are also the authors of the very first 1974 article in Social Indicators Research.
In a forthcoming article, we will follow this conceptual controversy further, exploring also how it has affected the scales of measurement used in happiness studies.
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Kullenberg, C., Nelhans, G. The happiness turn? Mapping the emergence of “happiness studies” using cited references. Scientometrics 103, 615–630 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1536-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1536-3