Examining Trends in Homelessness Research: A Literature Review

ABSTRACT This literature review explores trends in publications on the topic of “ homelessness ” across a range of academic disciplines from the years 2000–2023. The fields surveyed include social work, public health, behavioral science, operations research, systems engineering, and urban studies. The review first quantifies the notable increase in publications resulting from an initial keyword search of homelessness on Google Scholar across the academic disciplines surveyed over the years. In particular, the results surveyed show that the number of publications addressing both “ homelessness ” and “COVID‐19” doubled from 7600 in 2020 to 15,500 in 2021, peaking at 17,400 in 2022. Following the initial keyword search, a Web of Science database search and a survey of individual journal websites were conducted to identify the main fields and journals that have contributed to homelessness research. The results of these additional sources reveal a noticeable gap in research from the operations research and systems engineering fields on homelessness research compared to the other fields surveyed, such as social studies, health studies, and economic and quantitative studies. This gap indicates the potential opportunities that may arise by encouraging disciplines with lower surveyed publication rates toward more research on homelessness. The gap also identifies the potential opportunities that may be achieved by the multidisciplinary integration of fields with lower publication rates and others with higher publication rates into “ homelessness ” research. The review also examines the geographic distribution of homelessness studies and observes a correlation with cities exhibiting high rates of homelessness, including Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and the District of Columbia. Additionally, the review scans publications with key contributing factors to homelessnes s, such as mental health issues, substance use, and alcohol abuse, and observes that mental health is the most frequently studied category in the factors surveyed, followed by substance use. Further, the survey finds that factors such as the lack of social housing and family‐related challenges have received much less literature coverage. Lastly, the review scans foundational sociological theories on homelessness, including structural functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and social constructionism, and observes that the topic of homelessness has found a recognized place within these sociological perspectives in the literature, with structural functionalism getting the most references within the papers surveyed and conflict theory getting the least.