A Bibliometric Analysis of Publication Trends of Empirical Studies Over the Past 50 years Using the Child Attachment Studies Catalog and Data Exchange (CASCADE)

This study describes the historical trends and gaps of attachment research through a bibliometric analysis of past research on observational measures of child-parent attachment. Given the substantial amount of research that has been amassed on child-parent attachment since the publication of Bowlby and Ainsworth’s seminal work in the 1970s, this study provides an important synthesis of the state of child attachment research. This analysis leverages the Child Attachment Studies Catalog and Data Exchange (CASCADE) catalog, a repository of all empirical studies using observational measures of child-parent attachment. The bibliometric analysis includes a total of 2,318 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and dissertations from 1970 to 2023. Key study characteristics described include parent gender, geographical location, publication growth over time, publication venue, population samples, measurement tools, primary predictors, and main outcomes. Key findings reveal that the vast majority of child-parent attachment research over the past 50 years has been conducted on child-mother dyads (88.3%), has been set in North America (72.8%) or Europe (18.9%), is drawn predominantly from community samples (61.5%), and includes 24.4% of individuals of ethnic minority status. A small number of studies are conducted on samples with a demographic or health risk (24.7%), clinical risk (8.3%), or from foster/adoptive backgrounds (4.4%). Findings from this bibliometric analysis highlight the need for more attention to non-maternal caregivers, increased research on child attachment in non-Western settings, and more studies on at-risk populations including those from low socioeconomic backgrounds.