Mapping the Themes, Impact, and Cohesion of Creativity Research over the Last 25 Years
By Richard N. Williams, Mark A. Runco, Eric L Berlow. 2016
86 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article describes the themes found in the past 25 years of creativity research. Computational methods and network analysis were used to map keyword theme development across ~1,400 documents and ~5,000 unique keywords from 1990 (the first year keywords are available in Web of Science) to 2015. Data were retrieved from Web of Science using the search string: “creative process” OR “creative personality” OR “creative product” OR “creative place” OR “creativity research” OR “creative style” OR “creative potential” OR “creative problem.” The largest three keyword themes (36% of all documents) reflect three dominant foci of creativity research in the past 25 years: (a) innovation in the workplace, (b) the role of personality and intelligence in divergent thinking, and (c) creative performance with a focus in idea generation. Articles with the highest citation rates tended to be those with more unique keyword signatures; having a very common keyword signature was more consistently associated with low impact. Peak citation trends for each keyword theme suggests the following development: Foundational research on creativity in education and collaborative problem solving peaked in the early 1990’s. This was followed by high impact work in 1995–2000 on the creative process and creative performance—particularly idea generation and brainstorming. 2001–2010 saw the rise of highly cited research on innovation in the workplace, and this was followed by more recent high impact work on the role of personality and intelligence in divergent thinking. This broad trend from descriptive to more applied and then more predictive research themes may be characteristic of any emerging research field maturing over time.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Mechanical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f76ab7ab2cb2d556bbd1882752a77ed8617a693f
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Citations in the corpus
- A bibliometric analysis of creativity in the field of business economics (2018, background): “More recently, Williams, Runco, and Berlow (2016) conducted an analysis on publications between 1990 and 2015 using research strings associated with creativity; the types of documents were limited to articles, reviews, and procedural documents.”