Trends and Patterns in Workplace BullyIng Research: A Bibliometric Perspective

Abstract

Workplace bullying is a pervasive and detrimental behavior that manifests in various forms, including verbal, physical, psychological, and cyberbullying. It creates a hostile work environment that can severely impact employee well-being, job satisfaction, and overall workplace dynamics. Meanwhile, this study aims to explore workplace bullying research-related publishing patterns and trends in the most commonly used author keywords in the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases. The eminent software, ScientoPy and VOSviewer, are used to run and execute relevant publication data retrieved from Scopus and WoS. The results showed a positive trend in the growth of workplace bullying literature in both databases since 2000. The top three research areas that dominate this topic are “Business & Economics”, “Psychology”, and “Government & Law”. Based on a country analysis, the United States has become an active publisher, followed by the United Kingdom and Australia. Importantly, this study emphasized that the scholarly practices prevalent in workplace bullying research have impressively propagated. The trends will assist researchers in recognizing various fields in identifying the core areas, proactive institutions, and productive authors published in this knowledge for supplementary investigation. Besides, by examining the most popular keywords, the results of these studies enable researchers to discover the possibilities for future research that may be conducted, particularly concerning the annual growth rates, which have been trending in the last five years.