CHARACTERISING LEGAL PSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH THROUGH THE WEB OF SCIENCE

The usefulness of bibliometric studies in the analysis of scientific activity and as a complement to other indicators has been largely accepted. This paper presents the findings of a bibliometric study of the scientific production in legal psychology covered by the Web of Science (WoS) databases. A total of 358 documents, signed by 674 authors, were retrieved. The bibliometric indicators used show on ongoing increase in the number of papers in this discipline, articles being the most common document type. With a total of 42 papers, The European Journal of Psychology Applied to Legal Context is the publication most frequently used by researchers. Papers were mostly signed by male authors (59.62%), compared to female authors, (40.38%), and papers written in collaboration (59.78%) prevailed over those written individually (40.22%). The University of Leicester (England) -with 9 papers- and the University of Granada (Spain) -with 7 papers- have the highest number of researchers in this area, being the United States, England and Spain the countries with more papers in this particular field. As a conclusion, our data confirm that Legal Psychology is undergoing expansion and that Spanish scientific production plays a relevant role in this area.