Bibliographical Analysis on Animal Assisted Therapy and Mental Health

Abstract

Purpose: Animal-assisted therapy and mental health are examined in this work by doing a bibliometric study.

Method: From 2001 to the end of 2021, Scopus was used to gather bibliographic data on animal assisted therapy and mental health.

Results: There were 43 documents found in all, 62.8% of the documents were picked from research article. The scientific community's output increased at an average yearly rate of 12.69 percent, according to the study. The highest growth was seen in the year 2017 to 2021 as compared to any consecutive years. Spain, the United States, India, Switzerland, Ireland, and Hong Kong were among the world's most important and productive institutions. Health care, psychology, and the social sciences were the most often mentioned subfields in this topic, as were the arts and humanities, medicine, and the medical profession. The most frequent keywords used were animal-assisted therapy, residential care, mental health, creativity in counselling, animal assisted psychotherapy, single-case design, adolescence, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, animal-assisted interventions, pet ownership, human-animal bond, pet therapy, depression. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health was the most popular journal.

It was observed that all 43 research documents were published in 32 journals.

 Conclusion: Still in its infancy is the field of animal-facilitated mental health treatment. A substantial rise in the number of publications on animal-assisted treatment in mental health has been seen in recent years, beginning in late 2001. animal assisted therapy in mental health documents published yearly were very limited and after year 2017 there is better growth rate can be seen. It was shown that books have more citation than journal, article and received more citation. It was also revealed that very limited research is done in this topic.