Topic trends in sibling research in the journal of social and personal relationships

Sibling relationships are an important, but often understudied, close relationship. To examine how siblings have been studied over the past four decades in the <i>Journal of Social and Personal Relationships</i>, a leading international and multidisciplinary outlet for the study of interpersonal relationships, a search was conducted of the 2,151 articles published since the journal's inception in 1984. A total of 41 articles were identified that examined siblings among human populations, which was 2.4% of all articles published. Topics and historical trends were identified by examining the full text of these 41 articles using a topic modeling approach, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). A total of six topics representing two thematic clusters were identified. The first three topics represented <i>specific groups</i> studied in sibling research, including emerging adults, family systems, and twins. The second set of three topics captured <i>content areas</i>, specifically, connectedness, behaviors, and other interpersonal relationships as they are connected to sibling relationships. Historical trends revealed variation in the salience of topics at different timepoints over the past four decades. Discussion interprets themes and trends and offers future directions in sibling research.