To provide a systematic view of the development of scholarly productivity in thanatology, we coded over 1,550 articles published in the field’s leading journals, Omega and Death Studies, for the 20-year period from 1991 to 2010. Tracing trends in the authorship of this evolving literature, we report evidence for (a) the increasing feminization of the field, reflected in the elimination of the gender imbalance in authorship that previously favored male scholars, (b) the emergence of larger and more cohesive networks of collaboration in the production of research, and (c) the diversification in nationality of authorship, signaled by a substantial surge in both the number of countries producing such research and in the percentage of the overall literature arising outside the traditionally American “home base” of the field. Taken together, these trends suggest maturation of thanatology as a scientific area, as well as the productivity of the individual scholars who jointly comprise this interdisciplinary specialty.
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