Research output on lucid dreaming research from 1966 to 2019: Bibliometric and network analyses on lucid dreaming

Lucid dreaming is a phenomenon that can be classified as altered state of consciousness. In the last years the scientific interest for it has grown exponentially. To understand how the research on this topic evolved during the time, bibliometric and network analyses were performed. The focus of the analysis was on: 1) papers; 2) authors; 3) countries and 4) collaborations. Scopus database was used to retrieve articles on lucid dreaming. The analyses included publications published between 1966 and 2019. The productive countries, citation analysis, keywords co-occurences, international collaboration, active authors, and active journals were retrieved and analyzed. A total of 306 articles were retrieved. They refer to the period between 1966 to 2019. The average citations per documents was 12.79. The documents annual growth rate was 5.60. Stratified by number of publications, the United States ranked first with 59 papers. The highest percentage of international collaboration was seen for researchers from Germany. Most active journals in the context of lucid dreaming were Dreaming, International Journal of Dream Research, Perceptual and Motor Skills. Schredl M. and Erlacher D. were the two most productive authors in terms of number of published papers, number of citations, h and g indices. LaBerge S. was the author with the longest research productivity. The strongest co-authorship relationship was between Schredl M. and Erlacher D while the strongest university collaboration was between Heidelberg University (Germany), Central Institute of Mental Health (Germany) and the University of Bern (Switzerland). Publications on lucid dreaming have increased in the past decades. This shows that the topic is becoming more and more appealing to the scientific world and not anymore confined to the esoteric tradition. Several countries are involved in the research and some of them collaborate on this topic. The number of papers is exponentially increasing from 1979. This means that the topic is a hot topic and more and more studies are expected in the next years for a better understanding of a branch of consciousness that was mainly overlooked until 1979.