SynthesisFrontiers in pediatrics2026
Mapping social work scholarship in child and adolescent mental health: a bibliometric analysis of Web of Science and Scopus, 2000-2025.
Synthesis in Frontiers in pediatrics, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: Child and adolescent mental health care depends on coordination among pediatric services, mental health care, schools, child welfare, family support, and community systems. Social work occupies a boundary-spanning position in this landscape, yet the organization and development of the relevant scholarship remain unclear. Methods: Records published between 2000 and 2025 were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus. The search captured literature explicitly identified as psychiatric, mental health, or clinical social work together with broader social work scholarship situated in child and adolescent mental health. Records were merged, deduplicated, screened for relevance, and analyzed with bibliometrix in R and VOSviewer. The focused analysis examined temporal growth, publication venues, international collaboration, cited-author co-citation, author-keyword co-occurrence, thematic structure, and interperiod thematic flows. Results: The final corpus comprised 2,623 publications. Annual output increased from 35 publications in 2000 to 254 in 2025; the compound annual growth rate was 8.3%, with a similar estimate when 2024 was used as the endpoint. The literature appeared in 837 sources. Country-affiliation data were available for 2,594 publications; the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia were the most frequently represented countries, and 14.6% of country-identified publications involved more than one country. Co-citation patterns indicated five intersecting traditions: developmental and ecological theory; trauma and resilience; evidence-based service implementation; social work practice knowledge; and workforce well-being. Six keyword domains connected service systems and implementation, clinical and family-centered practice, child protection, trauma and resilience, youth mental health and treatment, and social determinants affecting marginalized populations. Mental health and social work showed the strongest thematic continuity. Trauma, adverse childhood experiences, resilience, family support, and service-system concerns became more visible in recent periods. Integrated pediatric and primary care, digital mental health, and scholarship from low- and middle-income settings were comparatively less prominent. Conclusion: The field has expanded beyond individual clinical care, but its knowledge base remains geographically uneven and is more developed in child welfare, school, trauma, and family-service contexts than in integrated pediatric care. Future research should test social work contributions to cross-sector integration, access, continuity, family experience, and health equity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.