Trends in legal ethics research: a bibliometric analysis

ABSTRACT This article explains the main theoretical aspects of legal ethics, identifies the nature and intellectual structures of legal ethics research, and examines the occurrences, relationships, interconnections, developments and emerging trends of the topic of legal ethics in global legal research, using one of the methods of scientometrics – bibliometric analysis. The annual growth of legal research outputs indexed by Scopus was about 7% over the entire period of study (1991–2020). The most popular type of research outputs in the field of legal ethics are research articles. A multidisciplinary scope of scholarly sources on legal ethics reveals the scholarly development of each field/scientific branch that is both unique and integrated with law and legal ethics, unfolds multifaceted perspectives of legal ethics research, and a contextual sociolegal approach to legal ethics as a social, societal, and political expression. Legal ethics is a much broader and more complex phenomenon than simply a set of codes/rules of ethics and requires integrated research: from an understanding of the particular impact and significance of legal education, ethical rules, and personal morality to ethical decision-making processes, cognitive and social factors.