Insights from a Bibliometric Analysis of Vividness and Its Links with Consciousness and Mental Imagery

Abstract

We performed a bibliometric analysis of the peer-reviewed literature on vividness between 1900 and 2019 indexed by the Web of Science and compared it with the same analysis of publications on consciousness and mental imagery. While we observed a similarity between the citation growth rates for publications about each of these three subjects, our analysis shows that these concepts rarely overlap (co-occur) in the literature, revealing a surprising paucity of research about these concepts taken together. A disciplinary analysis shows that the field of Psychology dominates the topic of vividness, even though the total number of publications containing that term is small and the concept occurs in several other disciplines such as Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. The present findings suggest that without a coherent unitary framework for the use of vividness in research, important opportunities for advancing the field might be missed. In contrast, we suggest that an evidence-based framework (such as the bibliometric analytic methods as exemplified here) will help to guide research from all disciplines that are concerned with vividness and help to resolve the challenge of epistemic incommensurability amongst published research in multidisciplinary fields.