Growth of Psychology and Clinical Psychology Literature: A Comparative Analysis of India, World and European Countries

Abstract

The present study compares the literature in the disciplines of psychology and clinical psychology from India, the World, and European countries between 1989 and 2023, looking at the expansion of these fields as per the data of the Web of Science.  To examine the growth and trend of the literature, various growth models were applied to the dataset from the defined countries and the data was analyzed using MS Excel. Overall an increasing trend of production is seen from all three of them, the maximum papers have been produced during the block 2019-2023 and the minimum during 1989-1993. An increasing trend in Relative Growth Rate is seen among which the world’s mean RGR is the highest in both fields i.e., 0.990 and 0.964 in psychology and clinical psychology respectively. The psychology & clinical psychology literature from all defined countries shows a decreasing trend of Dt values over the period. The curve fitting statistics show that except for the literature from European nations which best suit the linear growth model, the others i.e., the world and India show that the exponential growth model fits best to the Psychology literature. On the other hand, clinical psychology literature from the World, European nations, and India shows that it best fits the exponential growth statistics. The chi-square test statistics show that the European countries clinical psychology literature follows the logarithmic model and the Indian Psychology literature follows the Linear growth Model as the calculated chi-square values are -95782.4 and -913.53 respectively, which are less than the theoretical chi-square values. Except for these two, none of the datasets follows any growth models when tested through chi-square analysis.