School-parents relationships: a bibliometric study on forty years of scientific publication

The present paper explores the amount of research activitiy estimated through the growth of scientific literature in the field of parents' participation in their children's schooling: it is a so-called bibliometric analysis. Assessing the "size of science" is a complex task, but bibliometric techniques have been shown to be useful in the development of scientific research activity to address emerging concerns (Katz & Hicks, 1997) such as the rate of development of a certain discipline and of specific areas of scientific interest. Data for analysis were collected from several relevant queries restricted to articles in Cambridge Scienfici Abstracts (C.S.A.) online database. Nearly 11,000 bibliographic records were retrieved, with publication dates ranging from 1966 to 2005. The study attempts to answer two main research questions: which is the rate of literature growth in the field of parent participation (and the expected rates for the forthcoming years), and which are the different dynamics through different research fields (Pedagogy, Psychology, Sociology, etc.)? Our results reveal a strong growth rate in the number of articles published, and rather significant differences in the various disciplines taken into consideration.