Anglada-Tort, Manuel and Skov, Martin. 2022. What counts as aesthetics in science? A bibliometric analysis and visualization of the scientific literature from 1970 to 2018. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 16(3), pp. 553-568. ISSN 1931-3896 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Many scientific disciplines give rise to research published under the moniker of aesthetics. For instance, both psychology and neuroscience have highly active subfields focused on aesthetics research, known as empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics. However, it remains unclear what aesthetics is about, and, consequently, if aesthetics research pursued by different scientific disciplines addresses common problems. It is, therefore, difficult to assess how well aesthetics is doing as a scientific enterprise, identify and compare its main subfields, and quantify its productivity. To give an unbiased account of what counts as aesthetics across scientific disciplines, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of every publication found in Web of Science tagged as aesthetics. Spanning, 1970 to 2018, the retrieved literature comprised a total of 27,159 papers, 45,832 authors, and 123 countries. Visualization and bibliometric techniques were used to investigate the main research trends and subfields, growth of publications, citation analysis, and country productivity and collaborations. From 1970 to 2018, there was a clear increase in aesthetics research over time, with a stronger growth in recent years. The retrieved documents received a total of 217,931 citations, with a mean of 8.02 citations per document (SD = 25.7). Both a cluster analysis of the data, and a comparative analysis a posteriori, revealed that the aesthetics literature clusters into distinct research areas that differ significantly in their object of interest, research productivity and impact. This finding suggests that aesthetics is better thought of as a confederate of research traditions than a whole unified by common problems and research strategies.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000350
Additional Information:	“©American Psychological Association, [2022]. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. The final article is available, upon publication, at: https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000350”
Keywords:	aesthetics, bibliometrics, Web of Science, psychology, neuroscience
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Psychology
Dates:	Date Event August 2022 Published
Item ID:	36638
Date Deposited:	12 Jun 2024 10:14
Last Modified:	12 Jun 2024 15:43
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/36638

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