JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Recently well-being received an increased attention among positive psychologists developing effective interventions directed to anyone willing to improve their well-being. Despite of great number of empirical studies and systematic reviews conducted in this field, there is no holistic overview of published systematic reviews on psycho-social interventions improving well-being. This emerging research field has been found interesting and attractive to keep it in the research agenda. Therefore, author analyzed selected papers to find out the patterns in psycho-social interventions and well-being with the help of bibliometric analysis.

Objective:

This research aims to explore the scientific patterns of the effectiveness of different psycho-social interventions improving well-being among various categories of individuals with mental and physical diseases, to synthesize studies on well-being interventions, and to suggest the gaps and further studies in this research field.

Methods:

The bibliometric analysis included identifying publication patterns, most productive authors, institutions and countries, most explored fields of study and subjects, most active journals and publishers, as well as citation analysis, and publication trends for the studies period. In this study, research questions were formed based on the relevant literature. Author applied the bibliometric approach to analyze and synthesize the data retrieved from the well-known databases.

Results:

A total of 156 studies were found concerning the research domains and were retrieved with the LENS software from highly-ranked databases (Crossref, Microsoft Academic, PubMed, and Core). Analyzed papers written in the English language by 100 authors/co-authors from 24 countries, where leading is United Kingdom. Descriptive characteristics of the publications showed the increased number of publications in 2017 (n=35) and 2019 (n=34), and decreased number in 2021 (n=4). The top three fields of study are Medicine (n=84), Psychological intervention (n=80), and Psychology (n=62). Top two leading authors by the amount of citations per paper are: James Thomas (3 papers and 260 citations) and Chris Dickens ( 3 papers and 182 citations). However, the most cited was paper by Sanders et al. (2014) with 592 citations. Journals BMJ open (n=6) is leading in Medicine, Clinical psychology review (n=5) in psychological field, while Frontiers in psychology in Psychological intervention (n=5) and Psychology (n=5). The top three publishers are Willey (n=28), Elsevier (n=25) and BioMed Central (n=15).

Conclusions:

The current research indicated an overall significant increase in research domains within the last two decades. The main contribution of the findings indicates that psycho-social interventions were evaluated as effective in managing mental and physical problems, and well-being increase. CBT was assessed as effective in treatment of anxiety, psycho-education in relapse prevention, gratitude interventions in improvement of overall health, while mindfulness approach had a positive impact on decrease of distress and depression. Besides, all mentioned types of interventions resulted in overall increase of individuals’ well-being and resilience. Integrating social and cultural factors with considering individual differences increase the efficiency of psycho-social interventions. Furthermore, psycho-social interventions were evaluated as effective in managing symptoms of eating disorders, dementia and cancer. This paper would be useful for researchers to obtain an overview of the publication trends on research domains to be concerned for further studies, since it shows current findings and the potential gaps in these fields. It would be also beneficial for practitioners working on increase of their own and patients well-being. Clinical Trial: n/a