Environmental Social Work as a Polycentric Praxis Field: A Bibliometric and Full-Text Topic Modeling Analysis (1966-2025).

Abstract

Purpose: This study examined the long-term development of environmental social work as a field characterized by strong political-normative claims about what social work ought to do in relation to environmental crises, alongside a comparatively limited cumulative empirical evidence base concerning actual professional practice and impact.

Method: Using a mixed bibliometric and full-text topic-modeling design, the study analyzed peer-reviewed ESW scholarship retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Bibliometric analyses covered 761 publications (1966-2025), while full-text topic modeling and lexical-semantic analyses were conducted on 716 extractable full-text articles (1972-2025) using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Structural Topic Modeling (STM), and bibliometric science-mapping techniques implemented in R.

Results: The findings suggest that environmental social work expanded additively rather than paradigmatically, with successive discourses and vocabularies accumulating without displacing earlier ones. This pattern produced wide thematic dispersion, conceptual plurality, and multiple centers of gravity without clear paradigmatic dominance.

Discussion: Four dominant framing styles ‒ crisis-emergency, normative justice-advocacy, pedagogical-competency, and ecological-relational-spiritual ‒ coexisted across the literature but remained weakly integrated. Overall, the study argues that environmental social work is best understood as a polycentric, evolving political-normative praxis field rather than a coherent theoretical sub-discipline.