Mapping workplace compassion research across the social sciences: A bibliometric review

Hannah Kunst, Eliza Byington, Anya Johnson and Helena Nguyen

Australian Journal of Management, 2025, vol. 50, issue 3, 665-705

Abstract: To advance scientific knowledge on workplace compassion, we need to know ‘where we are now’ to identify ‘where to go next’. This article provides a systematic review of workplace compassion research, spanning almost 30 years and 1433 articles across the social sciences. We employ bibliometric techniques to (1) identify and map the literature’s intellectual foundations with a co-citation map revealing 595 key journals, (2) provide an interactive topic map showing 267 key research topics, (3) reveal the most frequent, trending, and most-cited article topics, and (4) provide an empirically derived taxonomy of two primary topic clusters: Compassionate Labour (e.g. research in healthcare settings, where compassion is relevant to the work being done), and Mental Health (e.g. research on burnout, compassion fatigue/empathic distress, compassion satisfaction, stress, interventions). We review key research themes in these clusters and identify promising future research directions to advance the field. JEL classification: I10, J21, M10

Keywords: Bibliometric analysis; review; taxonomy; workplace compassion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03128962251358615 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ausman:v:50:y:2025:i:3:p:665-705

DOI: 10.1177/03128962251358615

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Australian Journal of Management from Australian School of Business
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().