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

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