Mapping social work scholarship in child and adolescent mental health: a bibliometric analysis of Web of Science and Scopus, 2000–2025

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.