A Scientometric and Bibliometric Analysis of the Scientific Literature on Models of Disability

One of the biggest problems faced by people with disabilities is that society’s perception of disability exacerbates their suffering. Research on disability has not shown much interest over time, with researchers tending to analyze disability marginally or only from a single direction, that of treating the deficiencies that these people suffer from, and less from a social point of view, and the barriers that they encounter in daily life. The purpose of this study is to observe the trend in scientific literature regarding the way of approaching disability and to observe which models of disability tend to lean towards. Over time, several models of disability have been developed, and these have been debated and interpreted differently by specialists. Of these, the individualized medical model and the social model are the most debated models, being considered the most comprehensive. The way society perceives disability has a crucial impact and directly and permanently affects people with disabilities, influencing their lives from all points of view. For this, we conducted a bibliometric and scientometric research using the Web of Science Core Collection database - Clarivate Analytics (WoS) to observe the number of publications in a period of time, the preferred fields of publication and the trend regarding the interest of researchers in people with disabilities, the countries that are most involved and the main authors in the field. Using VOSviewer to generate comprehensive knowledge maps to analyze the links between different domains to observe the way in which disability is viewed as a whole and the connections between words related to disability. Results further indicate the preponderance of research from the spectrum of the medical model of disability. Through this method of analysis, researchers are able to observe the direction that scientific literature is approaching and to choose future research directions.