A Comprehensive Analysis of Labor Economics: Trends and Insights Through Bibliometric Methods

Using quantitative data, the aim of the study is to bring to the attention of researchers a systematic summary of existing writings on labor economics in order to identify study trends related to the concept. Bibliometric data of various types of articles published between 1989–2024 were used as the unit of analysis. These data were obtained from the Web of Science database. This study aims to map the evolution of the concept and the studies conducted on this concept, specifically the research on the concept of Labor Economics. Considering the distribution of 2678 works on labor economics according to publication years, it is seen that the highest concentration is in 2022 (266 works), 2020 (253 works) and 2021 (207 works); The names that produced the most works were Joop Hartog, Alex Brayson and Knut Roed; The publication type was mainly journal articles (2476), proceeding papers (278) and book chapters (130); In terms of research areas, works were published in the fields of economics (2497), labor and industrial relations (451), management (51) and sociology (36); In terms of the distribution of publications by country, the leadership is in publishers originating from the USA (594), Germany (527) and England (410); Works were published primarily in English (2655), Russian (9) and German (5); It has been determined that the publications scanned in SSCI (2047), ESCI (399) and AHCI (274) indices are dominant. When we look at the most frequently used keywords in publications on labor economics, the following are Unemployment with 114 repetitions, Employment with 112 repetitions, Wages with 82 repetitions, labor economics with 79 repetitions and education expressions with 68 repetitions. Based on these results, the research is a basic guide for future researchers in the field of labor economics.