Beyond traditional paradigms: a bibliometric and systematic content analysis of quantitative and qualitative methodological innovations in organizational psychology

Dickson Mdhlalose

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2026, vol. 4, 14 pages

Abstract: The study aimed to map methodological innovations in the field through a comprehensive bibliometric and systematic content analysis of 14,617 peer-reviewed publications indexed in the Web of Science, Scopus, and APA PsycINFO databases from 2020 to 2025. The research did not involve collecting primary data from human subjects; instead, it used VOSviewer (version 1.6.20) and the bibliometrix package (version 4.2.1) in R to analyse publication trends, citation patterns, keyword co-occurrence networks, and methodological practices. Key findings included a 79.8% increase in publications using advanced quantitative approaches, and dramatic growth in digital ethnography (229%) and natural language processing applications (296%). Mixed-methods studies had a higher mean citation count (47.3 citations per paper) than quantitative-only (31.6) and qualitative-only (19.4) papers; these are corpus-level descriptive statistics and were not subjected to inferential testing. Co-occurrence analysis identified five thematic clusters, indicating increasing interest in within-person dynamics, computational text analysis, network modeling, and digital organizational phenomena. The study warns of the danger of uncritical adoption of novel methods, which may lead to prioritizing methodological fashion over epistemological and contextual fit. The paper proposes the Methodological Fit Matrix, a framework comprising seven empirically grounded dimensions and demonstrating face validity, to help researchers align methodological choices with research questions, temporal orientation, epistemological assumptions, data structures, and organizational context. While the matrix is conceptually derived, it has not yet been empirically validated as a decision-making tool, but it provides a practical basis for more contextually appropriate and theoretically coherent methodological innovation in organizational psychology.

Keywords: bibliometric analysis; digital ethnography; epistemological fit; Methodological Fit Matrix; methodological innovation; mixed-methods integration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C80 M10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:342385

DOI: 10.3389/forgp.2026.1863419

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