Bibliometric Exploration of Sickness Presence Research: Global Trends, Emerging Themes, and Research Agenda

The phenomenon of employees’ sickness presence at work has attracted growing scholarly and managerial attention, owing to its rising global prevalence and the evidence that the costs incurred from such behaviour often surpass those linked with absenteeism. However, to date, the literature lacks a holistic retrospection of this phenomenon. The present paper addresses this gap by examining prevailing patterns, knowledge underpinnings, and emerging thematic directions in the domain of sickness presence through a bibliometric analysis of documents from 1996 to 2025. A corpus of 428 unique research papers retrieved from the Scopus database, meeting the inclusion criteria, has been analysed using VOSviewer software and the bibliometrix package implemented in the R statistical environment. Bibliometric procedures applied in this study include performance assessment (drawing on publication and citation indicators), science mapping approaches (bibliographic coupling, co-citation analysis, and thematic map), and network analysis. The study found that sickness presence, as a field of research, has been gaining increasing attention since its inception in 1996, especially in the last decade. The most prolific and impactful scientific actors—i.e. authors, institutions, countries, documents, and sources—are discussed. The study also highlights key knowledge foundations and current themes in this domain. Moreover, a few unexplored sub-themes specific to sickness presence research that require immediate attention from the researchers and stakeholders are listed.