Forest bathing: a quantitative exploration of emerging trends, patterns, and growth areas

In the early 80s of the last century, forest bathing was born in Japan to improve citizens’ physical and psychological well-being. Since then, forest bathing has spread worldwide, focusing the scientific community’s attention since the end of the 90s. This study aims to investigate the scientific literature on forest with the aim to highlight emerging trends, patterns, and growth areas, through a bibliometric network approach. This approach combines bibliometric review and social network analysis to uncover publication trends and reveal the collaboration patterns among researcher teams. The results of this study show 224 publications on the Scopus database from 1998 to 2022, with an average value of 8.96 publications per year. The results of the bibliometric network analysis show five clusters mainly focused on the mental health and physical benefits related to forest bathing activities. In the last three years, the scientific community has focused on the importance of forests to improve citizens’ well-being and quality of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of this study show that the main knowledge gaps in the international literature concern the relationship between stand characteristics and the suitability of sites for forest bathing and the evaluation of the socio-economic benefits of these forest-based initiatives.