Personal Identity Through Time: Historical Fragmentation and the Concept’s Evolution From a Bibliometric Perspective

Research into the field of personal identity has seen exponential growth in recent years. There is, however, a lack of any systematic reviews that synthesise the advances that have been made. This paper aims to combine bibliometric and social network analysis (SNA) techniques to identify the principal actors (authors, institutions, documents, journals, countries, etc) and the main currents, research trends and their interrelations within the field of personal identity. The study analysed 998 research papers drawn from a search of the Web of Science database using the “Rstudio” environment and VOSviewer software. The results offer a revealing portrait of the evolution, connections and relations within the field, particularly the significant differences in the manner in which personal identity is approached within the disciplines of Psychology and Philosophy.