Intellectual disabilities (ID) are one of the largest, most complex, and frequently studied of the mental health and medical specialty areas. Thousands of papers have been published dating back to the early work on IQ testing more than a century ago. Many reviews have been published on specific topics with the field of ID, but to date no papers have appeared providing an overview of trends in this vast literature. In this paper we looked at studies published in referred journals from 1979 to 2008. Fifty-six thousand, three hundred and twenty studies were identified using the terms mental retardation and ID. The number of papers published per year ranged from 1038 to 2075 with the fewest papers published in 1980 and the greatest number of studies appearing in 2005. Genetics was by far the most frequently studied topic. The implication of these and related trends in the literature are discussed.
The field of intellectual disabilities (ID) has been one of robust and varied research for some time. A variety of topics ranging from the evaluation of genetic phenotypes (Chiurazzi, Schwartz, Gecz, & Neri, 2008), aggression (Matson & Nebel-Schwalm, 2007; Valdovinos, 2007) self-injurious behavior (Hill, Powlitch, & Furniss, 2008; Matson & Minshawi, 2007), social skills (Agaliotis & Kalyva, 2008; Chung et al., 2007 and Lancioni et al., 2008), adaptive behavior (Krakovsky, Huth, Lin, & Levin, 2007) and perceptions of college students (Ahlborn, Panek, & Jungers, 2008) have been studied. This massive and rapidly growing literature has led to a splintering in the field which has become more and more specialized with subspecialties such as dual diagnosis emerging. Given the nature of these developments, topical overviews seem to be a prudent course to help organize this large information base, and have occurred to some degree.
