Looking into Sexual Risk-Taking Literature: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Most young people engage in risky behaviors and experience unintended outcomes. One among them is sexual risk-taking behavior which includes sex work, having multiple partners, having sex under the influence of substances, unprotected sex, etc. This bibliometric study provides insight into the literature on sexual risk-taking and identifies the gap for further investigation into the field of research. The database used were Scopus and PubMed in which a valid search strategy was built to retrieve all the relevant information and eliminate irrelevant documents. The data from the retrieved literature is exported to plain text and Bibtex file and then further converted to MS Excel file through R studio and Biblioshiny. After excluding the reviews, limiting to psychology, and removing duplicates a total of 3545 articles from 753 sources were retrieved for further data extraction. The topics with recent relevance are STI, pregnancy, risk factors, and adolescent sexual behavior. It is noted that the STI including HIV is a threat to the national public health which needs to be addressed and controlled from the early stage of sexual development of children. Thus, more research needs to be carried out in the field of adolescent sexual risk-taking behavior and its connection with the spreading of STIs and the interventions and psychoeducation in the early stage to tackle this public health trajectory.