Twenty-five years of Health & Place: Citation classics, internationalism and interdisciplinarity

Abstract

To mark 25 years of Health & PlaceHealth & Place, we identify and appraise some key contributions to the journal over this period. We use citation data to identify 'classics' from the journal's back catalogue. We also examine trends in the international reach and disciplinary homes of our authors. We show that there has been a near 7-fold increase in the number of published papers between the early and most recent years of the journal and that the journal's citation levels are amongst the top 2% of social science journals. Amongst the most cited papers, some clear themes are evident such as physical activity, diet/food, obesity and topics relating to greenspace. The profile of the journal's authors is becoming more internationally diverse, represents a broader range of disciplines, and increasingly demonstrating cross/interdisciplinary ways of working. Although Anglophone countries have led the way, there is an increasing number of contributions from elsewhere including emerging economies such as China. We conclude with some comments on likely future directions for the journal including enduring concerns such as greenspace, obesity, diet and unhealthy commodities (alcohol, tobacco, ultra-processed food) as well as more recent directions including planetary health, longitudinal and lifecourse analyses, and the opportunities (and challenges) of big data and machine learning. Whatever the thematic concerns of the papers over next 25 years, we will continue to welcome outstanding research that is concerned with the importance place makes to health.

The evolution of Health & Place: Text mining papers published between 1995 and 2018

“…To mark the 25 th anniversary of Health & Place, we examine trends in the types of work published in Health & Place between 1995 and 2018. Our paper complements the accompanying bibliometric analysis also celebrating the milestone (Moon and Pearce, 2020). Through undertaking a text mining approach to assess how terms and themes within articles have changed over time, rather than the citations or author origins of papers as Moon and Pearce focus on, we provide a fine grained analysis of the evolution of the content published in Health & Place.…”

Factors, components and dynamics: investigation of journal self-citation and citation by equal opportunity model

“…The disciplines of educational technology and library and information science had obvious citation linkages (Lund, 2020). The interdisciplinary citation among disciplines related to development and related social sciences was low (Mitra et al, 2020) while the interdisciplinary citation among disciplines related to health and/or place was high (Moon and Pearce, 2020). In addition, the level of interdisciplinary citation positively correlated with JIF (Chen et al, 2021;Petterson et al, 2021).…”