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Five Decades of Scientific Development on “Attachment.pdf (1.56 MB)

Five Decades of Scientific Development on “Attachment Theory”: Trends and Future Landscape

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-10-11, 16:52 authored by Abbas Ghanbari BaghestanAbbas Ghanbari Baghestan, Nader Ale EbrahimNader Ale Ebrahim
Attachment Theory is one of the most frequently used frameworks which revolutionised
the understanding of human behaviour, from early childhood to adulthood. Attachment
Theory’s scholarly output was examined using a quantitative bibliometric approach, based
on rigorous facts extracted from the WoS databases from 1970 to 2017. Overall, 1,700
documents in the category “Psychology” with the topic “Attachment Theory” were analysed
to fnd trends of publications, networking coupling, keywords frequencies, top authors, and
highly cited papers. A qualitative content analysis of the top 20 documents with the highest
average citation per year was done to provide insight on document approaches. The results
show that the scientifc productivity in “attachment theory” is highly skewed. The authors
recommend publishing attachment theory related articles in an open access journal. There is
a need for further interdisciplinary research and practice collaboration to move beyond the
sole psychological approach and realise the importance of multi-disciplinary approaches.

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