Trends in Bio-Behavioral Gambling Studies Research: Quantifying Citations

Both the National Gambling Impact Study Commission and the National Academy of Sciences have evaluated the current state of gambling studies research in general while making specific suggestions for future efforts in the psychological and biomedical areas in particular. Recognizing the importance of evaluating the state of the field on a macro level, this paper considers and categorizes several decades of psychological and biomedical gambling research. By examining the number of references to gambling in two major bibliographic databases, quantifiable trends and observations are presented about gambling-related psychological and biomedical research. Two trends in particular are salient: the rate at which gambling-related articles are published in scholarly journals is increasing, and the plurality of these articles deals with issues of cognition and personality as related to gambling.