Mapping the Research Domain in the Field of Applied Psychology: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Emerging Literature

The field of Applied Psychology spans across diverse domains of the human enterprise, including the areas of education, professional human services, health care, the law, military life, government, political processes, human factors, and business applications. Although, most of these areas are promoted and function as individual disciplines (with unique publication outlets), several scholarly journals, over the past century, have served as research repositories that have reflected both empirical and theoretical investigatory findings across the general field of applied psychology.The importance of applied research is perhaps, best evident in the recent initiative of 'Translational' sciences that portray the aspirational nature of applying knowledge gained from basic research towards adaptations to solving human problems in the real world. However, due to the voluminous nature of the extant literature in the select field of applied psychology, obtaining a clear perspective on the breadth of investigatory interest, over the years, seems rather elusive. Thus, in order to grasp emerging developments and research attention devoted to select issues in the field, a systematic review and analysis of the literature seems in order.Bibliometric analysis is a recognized and valid means of gaining a detailed perspective on research trends in the extant literature. Indeed, bibliometric approaches have been productively applied, over the past 50 years, in the social sciences (Nederhof, 2006; Schui & Krampen, 2010) and across business fields such as management (Fernandez-Alles & Ramos-Rodriguez, 2009; Podsakoff et al., 2008) and Industrial/Organizational Psychology (I/O) (Carlson & Millard, 1984; Meltzer, 1973; Piotrowski, 2012; Stock-Kupperman, 2011). Moreover, examination of repositories of the scholarly literature, in order to gain a historical perspective of disciplines like organizational science, has provided a utilitarian and educational view of published research over time (e.g., Stagner, 1982; Zickar, 2015). Perhaps, the most recognized bibliometric tool is referred to as 'Content Analysis' (see Krippendorff, 2004), which has been used in the field of Applied Psychology (i.e., Luse, Mennecke, & Townsend, 2012; Neall & Tuckey, 2014; Piotrowski & Armstrong, 2004). Over the years, this investigative technique has been particularly applied to the analysis of topical trends and aggregated publication characteristics of scholarly journals (e.g., Cox & Catt, 1977; Piotrowski, 2012). In fact, a host of studies have analyzed individual journals in the areas of applied behavioral science, management, I/O Psychology, and business-related issues (Brutus et al., 2013; Brutus et al., 2010; Giraud & Autissier, 2013; Lin et al., 2010; Miles & Naumann, 2011; Mirvis, 2014). Literature ReviewSeveral systematic reviews have reported detailed findings on the knowledge domain of the field of applied psychology, specific to industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology, over the past 50 years. Stagner (1982) analyzed the nascent literature in the I/O field and concluded that despite advances in the sophistication of research methods, the prominent areas of research focused on personnel selection, training, work performance, job satisfaction, and employee mental health. In an examination of the robustness of validity studies published in the Journal of Applied Psychology from 1964-1982, Schmitt et al. (1984) found that performance rating criteria generally produced lower validity coefficients. In terms of predictors, these investigators reported that cognitive ability tests were not superior to other predictors such as assessment centers, work samples, and job evaluations with personality measures was the least valid. In an extensive analysis on 'philosophical influences' of 4000 published articles from 23 management journals from 2002-2006, Adcroft and Willis (2008) concluded that egalitarian and positivist approaches captured the scholarly framework of the majority of studies. …