Bibliometrically Locating International Journal of Affective Engineering on The Landscape of Design Research

Affective engineering is an interdisciplinary domain within design research, yet its disciplinary scope remains ambiguous, particularly for newcomers. Here we show the location of affective engineering, represented by papers published in the Int. J. Affect. Eng. (IJAE), occupies a unique position within the broader landscape of design research. We analyzed and compared ~200 IJAE papers to the other ~60,000 design research papers using a bibliometric approach. After we collected high-dimensional representations of titles and abstracts, including externally generated text embeddings and TF-IDF, we further embedded them into two-dimensional visual maps using UMAP. Additionally, we visualized metadata such as author affiliation and citation metrics to highlight IJAE’s distinct characteristics. Our findings reveal IJAE’s relatively low author affiliation diversity and citation impact, underscoring challenges for affective engineering’s global recognition and integration. Notably, IJAE exhibits a predominantly Japanese authorship base despite the international scope implied by its title. Conversely, we demonstrate that affective engineering is a thematically expansive domain with a diverse disciplinary scope. IJAE is better grouped with interaction design journals than engineering design journals, as its title might imply. Through exploratory data visualization, we identify IJAE as a unique, predominantly Japanese, low-impact, omnivorous interaction design journal.