A bibliometric analysis of psychological contract research: current status development and future research directions

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review and analyse the literature on psychological contract (PC) phenomena to date as well as give future research directions in this research area.Design/methodology/approachThe authors have conducted a bibliometric analysis of 33 years of research on PC. The bibliometric findings have identified various perspectives by drawing the landscape and developmental trajectory of PC research over time. A specific bibliographic analysis and visualization tool VOSviewer was employed to evaluate and process 1999 publications in the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) database from 1989 to 2022, also author citation analysis, journal co-citation analysis, reference analysis and analysis of 100 milestone articles.FindingsThe authors detected and visualized the landscape of PC area and track how this landscape has developed. Secondly, the authors present the findings emerged from this study's bibliometric review, with emphasize on future research directions and implications.Originality/valueThis paper presents bibliometric analysis of more than 1,000 research articles from main databases and review of 100 most prominent papers on PC research topic. This article offers academicians and researchers a more sophisticated understanding of the intellectual and conceptual framework of the research body. The authors are providing insights about its structural body of knowledge through an overview of the current state of scholarly development in the field of PC.