Multidisciplinary Approaches in Disability Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Disability is a complex, global, and multifaceted phenomenon that affects many parts of life, including healthcare, education, social welfare, inclusion, and social equality. Bibliometric analysis is a systematic, quantitative method for examining scholarly literature to identify research patterns, trends, and impacts across various fields. The present study employed quantitative bibliometric analysis to evaluate the intellectual construct, the thematic evolution, and the cooperation among researchers in multidisciplinary disability research. The data for this study were collected from the Web of Science (WoS) database, which includes high-quality articles from peer-reviewed journals of high standard. The study's findings show that multidisciplinary disability research experienced significant growth and increased academic influence between 2021 and 2025. The author citation network indicates a fragmented intellectual structure in multidisciplinary disability studies. The cluster structure reveals that multidisciplinary disability research is evolving through the coexistence of rights-based, social, clinical, and rehabilitative models. Although co-authorship analyses indicate that the most influential articles are driven by several authors or countries, multidisciplinary approaches to disabilities are expanding globally to address issues faced by PWDs.