This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary Material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.
Procrastination is generally perceived as a common behavioral tendency, and there are a growing number of literatures to discuss this complex phenomenon. To elucidate the overall perspective and keep abreast of emerging trends in procrastination research, this article presents a bibliometric analysis that investigates the panorama of overviews and intellectual structures of related research on procrastination. Using the Web of Science Database, we collected 1,635 articles published between 1990 and 2020 with a topic search on “procrastination” and created diverse research maps using CiteSpace and VOS viewer. Bibliometric analysis in our research consists of category distribution, keyword co-occurrence networks, main cluster analysis, betweenness centrality analysis, burst detection analysis, and structure variation analysis. We find that most research has focused on students' samples and has discussed the definition, classification, antecedents, consequences and interventions to procrastination, whereas procrastination in diverse contexts and groups remains to be investigated. Regarding the antecedents and consequences, research has mainly been about the relationship between procrastination and personality differences, such as the five-factor model, temperament, character, emotional intelligence, and impulsivity, but functions of external factors such as task characteristics and environmental conditions to procrastination have drawn scant attention. To identify the nature and characteristics of this behavior, randomized controlled trials are usually adopted in designing empirical research. However, the predominant use of self-reported data collection and for a certain point in time rather than longitudinal designs has limited the validation of some conclusions. Notably, there have been novel findings through burst detection analysis and structure variation analysis. Certain research themes have gained extraordinary attention in a short time period, have evolved progressively during the time span from 1990 to 2020, and involve the antecedents of procrastination in a temporal context, theoretical perspectives, research methods, and typical images of procrastinators. And emerging research themes that have been investigated include bedtime procrastination, failure of social media self-control, and clinical interventions. To our knowledge, this is almost the first time to conduct systematically bibliometric analysis on the topic of procrastination and findings can provide an in-depth view of the patterns and trends in procrastination research.
Keywords: procrastination, co-citation analysis, intellectual structure, CiteSpace, bibliometric analysis
Procrastination is commonly conceptualized as an irrational tendency to delay required tasks or assignments despite the negative effects of this postponement on the individuals and organizations (Lay, 1986; Steel, 2007; Klingsieck, 2013). Poets have even written figuratively about procrastination, with such phrases as “Procrastination is the Thief of Time,” and “Procrastination is the Art of Keeping Up with Yesterday” (Ferrari et al., 1995). Literal meanings are retained today in terms of time management. The conceptualizations of procrastination imply inaction, or postponing, delaying, or putting off a decision, in keeping with the Latin origins of the term “pro-,” meaning “forward, forth, or in favor of,” and “-crastinus,” meaning “tomorrow” (Klein, 1971). Time delay is just the behavioral reflection, while personality traits, cognitive and motivational process, as well as contextual conditions are in-depth inducements to procrastination. Procrastination can be viewed as purposive and irrational delay so as to miss the deadlines (Akerlof, 1991; Schraw et al., 2007).
Procrastination is believed to be a self-regulation failure that is associated with a variety of personal and situational determinants (Hen and Goroshit, 2018). Specifically, research suggests that task characteristics (e.g., unclear instructions, the timing of rewards and punishment, as well as task aversiveness), personality facets (e.g., the five-factor model, motivation, and cognition), and environmental factors (e.g., temptation, incentives, and accountability) are the main determinants of procrastination (Harris and Sutton, 1983; Johnson and Bloom, 1995; Green et al., 2000; Wypych et al., 2018). Procrastination can be an impediment to success, and may influence the individual's mood, and increase the person's anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem (Ferrari, 1991; Duru and Balkis, 2017). Furthermore, a person with procrastination is prone to poor performance, with lower exam scores, slower job promotions, and poorer health (Sirois, 2004; Legood et al., 2018; Bolden and Fillauer, 2020). Importantly, if policymakers postpone conducting their decision-making until after the proper timing, that procrastination can cause a significant and negative impact on the whole society, such as the cases with the COVID-19 pandemic management in some countries (Miraj, 2020).
In practice, procrastination is stable and complex across situations, ranging from students' academic procrastination, to staffs' work procrastination, to individuals' bedtime procrastination, to administrative behavior procrastination when government organizations face multiple tasks in national governance, and even to delayed leadership decision-making in crisis situations in global governance (Nevill, 2009; Hubner, 2012; Broadbent and Poon, 2015; Legood et al., 2018). As for science research, procrastination has attracted more and more attention and been studied extensively. Personally, possible explanations for emerging research focuses mainly consist of two aspects. On one hand, procrastination with high prevalence and obvious consequences highlights the importance to explore the complex phenomenon deeply, especially the meteoric rise in availability of information and communications technologies (ICTs) amplifies chronic procrastination, such as problematic social media use, smartphone addictions as well as mobile checking habit intrusion (Ferrari et al., 2007; Przepiorka et al., 2021; Aalbers et al., 2022). On the other hand, more and more basic and milestone research emerges in large numbers, which set the foundation for latecomer' further exploration toward procrastination. In particular, it can't be ignored the efforts of those productive authors in different periods to drive the knowledge development of procrastination.
Procrastination research has experienced tremendous expansion and diversification, but systematic and overview discussion is lacking. Several meta-analyses about procrastination have emerged, but they emphasize more on specific topics (Steel, 2007; Sirois et al., 2017; Malouff and Schutte, 2019). Furthermore, the number of newly published articles is increasing, so it becomes difficult to fully track the relevant domain literature. In order to grasp knowledge development about the fast-moving and complex research field, bibliometric analysis is necessary to construct diagram-based science mapping, so as to provide a comprehensive and intuitive reference for subsequent researchers. Thus, this article emphasizes on the following major research question: what is the intellectual base and structure of procrastination research? How does the emerging direction of procrastination develop? In our research, bibliometric analysis included the annual distribution of literature, distribution of categories, keyword co-occurrence networks, main research clusters, high citation betweenness centrality, and the strongest citation bursts, as well as the recent publications with transformative potential, in order to look back on the early development of procrastination research and look forward to the future transformation of that research. For both scholars and members of the public, this study can comprehensively enhance their understanding of procrastination and can provide overall perspectives for future research.
Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative method to investigate intellectual structures of topical field. On the basis of co-citation assumption that if two articles are usually cited together, then there are high associations between those articles, bibliometric analysis can reflect the scientific communicational structures holistically (Garfield, 1979; Chen et al., 2012). Bibliometric techniques, such as CiteSpace, VOSviewer, HistCite, can generate the science maps based on plenty of literature concerning certain domain. Through the process of charting, mining, analyzing, sorting, and displaying knowledge, science mapping can extract pivotal information from huge complex literature, present knowledge base and intellectual structure of a given field visually, then researchers even general individual can quickly grasp one subject's core structure, development process, frontier field and the whole knowledge framework (Chen, 2017; Widziewicz-Rzonca and Tytla, 2020). Bibliometric analysis is commonly regarded as a complementary method to traditional structured literature reviews such as narrative analysis and meta-analysis (Fang et al., 2018; Jiang et al., 2019). Traditional literature analysis tends to labor intensive with subjective preferences, and faces difficulties in analyzing larger body of literature, whereas bibliometric analysis provides a more objective approach for investigating considerable literature's intellectual structure through statistical analysis and interactive visual exploration.
In order to master the characteristics of procrastination research, the study adopted the bibliometric software of CiteSpace and VOSviewer to analyze the literature on procrastination during the time period 1990–2020. The software tool VOSviewer is designed for creating maps of authors, journals, and keyword co-occurrences based on network data (van Eck and Waltman, 2010), whereas CiteSpace is applied to conduct co-citation analysis, including centrality betweenness analysis, burst detection, and the emerging trends of research (Chen, 2006, 2017). In our study, we adopted the CiteSpace (5.7.R1) and VOSviewer (1.6.15) software together. Specifically, co-citation analysis mainly depends on CiteSpace software, and co-occurrence analysis is conducted through VOS viewer (Markscheffel and Schroeter, 2021).
Though there is one similar bibliometrics analysis toward this topic (Tao et al., 2021), related research just focuses on academic procrastination, and mainly conducts co-occurrence analysis using VOSviewer, so as to there is a lack of analysis to core co-citation structures including high betweenness centrality articles, citation burst research and structure variation analysis. To offer insight into the intellectual structure of procrastination research, we further employ CiteSpace — a java application including bibliometric analysis, data mining algorithms and visualization methods developed by Chen — to visualize and elucidate vital trends and pivotal points about knowledge development.
To conduct our bibliometric analysis of procrastination research, we collected bibliographic records from the Web of Science Core Collection as of December 31, 2020. Web of Science is currently the most relevant scientific platform regarding systematic review needs, allowing for a “Topic” query, including searching a topic in the documents' “title”, “abstract”, “author keywords” and “keywords plus” of the documents being reviewed (Yi et al., 2020). A topic search strategy is broad enough to be used in science mapping (Olmeda-Gomez et al., 2019). Given the aim of the study, records were downloaded if they had the term “procrastination” in the “Topic” field. After restricting the type of publication to “Article” for the years 1900–2020, we had searched 2105 papers about procrastination research.
Figure 1 shows the yearly distribution of 2105 literature during 1900–2020, and it can be classified into three phases. In phase I (1900–1989), the annual number of publications never exceeded 10. In phase II (1990–2010), the annual quantity gradually increased from 11 papers in 1991 to 48 in 2010. The annual number of publications had begun to grow in this period, but remained below 50 papers yearly. In phase III (2011–2020), however, the procrastination research experienced a dramatic growth, with 255 literature in the year 2020. Although procrastination research appeared as early as 1900s, it had a stable total volume until the 1990s, when it developed sustained growth, and that growth became extraordinary during the 2010s. Therefore, this research emphasized centered on 1,635 literature that were published during the time span 1990–2020.