Patterns of Disciplinary Involvement and Academic Collaboration in Gambling Research: A Co-Citation Analysis

The purpose of this study was to investigate the current academic research foci in peer-reviewed studies on gambling. The researchers used co-citation analysis as a bibliometrics method. All the gambling-related publications indexed in Scopus and Web of Science were identified, and their citation patterns were analyzed. Our dataset includes a total of 2418 peer-reviewed gambling studies published over the five-year period from 2014–2018. The VOSviewer tool was used to visualize bibliometric networks and reveal key clusters among the studies. The findings indicate that gambling researchers mostly cited authors from the disciplines of neuroscience, psychology, health science, and psychiatry. Only 2% of the cited authors were from other disciplines, such as those in the social sciences and humanities. The most frequently cited sources also reveal the same pattern: that gambling researchers mostly cited articles published in neuroscience, psychology, and health science journals. The publications reviewed deal mainly with the pathological and treatment aspects of gambling. We also discovered some unique patterns of citation and collaboration, focusing on topics such as videogames, social network games, family, business, and tourism.