The Essence of Love: An Exploratory Bibliometric Analysis of the Psychological Literature.

The construct Love has been the subject matter of voluminous popular literature and has attracted extensive scholarly attention for many decades. Yet, there is a dearth of studies that examine the scope and breadth of the intellectual structure of modern scholarship on this ubiquitous topic. The current study reports on a bibliometric content analysis of 1,562 peer-reviewed articles indexed in the field of psychology from 2012-2021. The most prominent investigatory topics identified, in rank order, were: Theory/Models, Brand love (marketing), Cultural factors, LBGTQ, Measures/Scales, Religion/Spirituality, Neurophysiology, Therapeutic issues, Mother love, Love styles, and Social media. Interestingly, several topical areas received scant investigatory attention (less than 1% of dataset), i.e., infidelity, divorce, falling-in love, sibling love, love of pets, suicide, loneliness, and cognitive styles. These findings a) offer a panorama on the state of contemporary scholarship regarding the subject matter of love, b) present a framework as a basis for the study of evolving research trends, and c) provide a tapestry in conceptually describing the essence of love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]