Publication trends in ‘Adoption & Fostering’
When I was asked to write a blog on publication trends in Adoption & Fostering, I was unsure how to best approach the topic. Should I write from my experience? Should I analyse the literature? Or should I focus on gaps in the literature instead? In the end, I decided to do all three of these things. Being a scientist, I couldn’t just “trust my gut feeling”, after all.
What I decided to do was to go through the articles published in Adoption & Fostering in the last two years from March 2022 to March 2024, which covers the last seven issues of the journal. I extracted key words describing the topic of each article and, as we scientists love nothing more than a pretty illustration, organised them in a word cloud.
The top topics might not come as a surprise. Research on attachment has never really been out of fashion since the pioneering work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth half a century ago. Of course I checked, and according to the scientific search engine ‘Web of Science’, the journal has published 101 articles on attachment, 89 on interventions and 80 on mental health in the last 20 years (which might very well be a conservative estimate). One interpretation of the popularity of this topic is that it represents an ongoing need to be addressed.
What springs to mind next is the term “digital technology”. This is due to our recent special issue on the digital turn in child and family social work. With smartphones taking over the world and the shift to remote ways of working promoted and facilitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, this truly is an important and emerging topic. If you don’t feel like reading, you could alternatively listen to our podcasts with the editors of the special issue or one of the other contributing authors.
If you put on your best Sherlock Holmes attire and take out the magnifying glass, you will spot some of the lesser explored topics in the last two years – one of these being child to parent violence, with only one article published recently. We will, however, publish another article on this topic in the October issue of Adoption & Fostering, and my editorial (spoiler alert!) will also focus on this important topic.
Even the best magnifying glass cannot spot what is simply not there, however. One of the missing topics is Fostering for Adoption which, as a placement option, was introduced in 2014 to secure early permanence. The topic has been explored in previous articles in Adoption & Fostering (for instance, Kirton et al., 2018; Woods et al., 2018), but not so much in recent years.
‘Fostering for adoption’ seems to be on an upwards trajectory in some regional adoption agencies. For instance, one agency reported a rise from an average of 3.5 quarterly placements in 2018/19 to 6.25 in 2019/20 and 7.6 in 2020/21. It should, however, be noted that research by Coram which explored patterns of early permanence in London showed that the capital was amongst the regions with the lowest rates of Fostering for Adoption placements. With some young people placed through this scheme now approaching their teenage years, the topic seems timely, and more research is needed. Let’s get to work!
Dr Dennis Golm, Editor-in-Chief, Adoption & Fostering