Insights from a Bibliometric Analysis of Vividness and Its Links with Consciousness and Mental Imagery
1
School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada
2
Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST), Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, QC H3C 3P8, Canada
3
Scholarly Communications Lab., Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada
4
Department of Neuroscience, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada
5
NICER Lab., Carleton University, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Brain Sci. 2020, 10(1), 41; https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10010041
Received: 10 December 2019 / Revised: 6 January 2020 / Accepted: 7 January 2020 / Published: 10 January 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Vividness, Consciousness, and Mental Imagery: Making the Missing Links across Disciplines and Methods)
We performed a bibliometric analysis of the peer-reviewed literature on vividness between 1900 and 2019 indexed by the Web of Science and compared it with the same analysis of publications on consciousness and mental imagery. While we observed a similarity between the citation growth rates for publications about each of these three subjects, our analysis shows that these concepts rarely overlap (co-occur) in the literature, revealing a surprising paucity of research about these concepts taken together. A disciplinary analysis shows that the field of Psychology dominates the topic of vividness, even though the total number of publications containing that term is small and the concept occurs in several other disciplines such as Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. The present findings suggest that without a coherent unitary framework for the use of vividness in research, important opportunities for advancing the field might be missed. In contrast, we suggest that an evidence-based framework (such as the bibliometric analytic methods as exemplified here) will help to guide research from all disciplines that are concerned with vividness and help to resolve the challenge of epistemic incommensurability amongst published research in multidisciplinary fields.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
vividness; consciousness; mental imagery; bibliometrics; map of science; term co-occurrence
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Haustein, S.; Vellino, A.; D’Angiulli, A. Insights from a Bibliometric Analysis of Vividness and Its Links with Consciousness and Mental Imagery. Brain Sci. 2020, 10, 41.
Show more citation formats
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
