The number of publications per year broadly presents the research process in PsyCap. Therefore, we divide the research into three phases on its growth trend: Steady growth (1970–2007), rapid growth (2008–2017), and high-rapid growth (2018–2022.9), as shown in Figure 1.

In the first stage: Steady growth (1970–2007), there are a total of 268 documents. The first article was published in 1970, written by Glodber (1970), which focused on law psychology. In this stage, research is dedicated to the construction of PsyCap theory, and the theme gradually moved from macro-social issues to micro-intervention issues (Luthans et al., 2006). It is worth mentioning that the introduction of positive PsyCap measure methods (Luthans and Youssef, 2007) has contributed to the development of empirical studies.

In the second stage: Rapid growth (2008–2017), a total of 989 papers were published. During the decade, the introduction of core elements such as positive psychology (Avey et al., 2008), politics (Abbas et al., 2014), information technology (Burns et al., 2017), and measurement methods (Wernsing, 2014). Among the important research, objects are happiness, performance, satisfaction, education, and health.

The third stage: High-rapid growth (2018–2022.9). During this period, 1,565 papers were published. Team PsyCap (Tho and Duc, 2021), the mediating role of PsyCap (Kumar D. et al., 2022), and COVID-19 (Brunetto et al., 2022) have become important research themes, further contributing to the development of the field. The relatively small amount of literature for 2022 is caused by the fact that the specific date of the search data is September 9, 2022.

We obtain the main ten categories and publications from the WOS database, presented in Table 1 and Figure 2, respectively. And the literature covers 155 categories of research. From Table 1, we can get the top-10 research categories about PsyCap, which are “Psychology Multidisciplinary,” “Management,” “Public Environmental Occupational Health,” “Psychology Applied,” “Business,” “Environmental Sciences,” “Psychiatry,” “Sociology,” “Economics,” “Environmental Studies.” The total number and proportion of the literature in the top ten research categories were 2,318, and 83.23%, respectively, indicating that the research on PsyCap was relatively concentrated.

The top 25 publications shown in Figure 2, “Frontiers in Psychology,” “International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health,” and “Sustainability” are the main publishers, with the number and percentage of publications (% of 2,786) being 146 (5.24%), 79 (2.84%), and 61 (2.19%). The journals ranked 4th to 10th are “Social Science Medicine,” “Plos One,” “International Journal of Psychology,” “Current Psychology,” “BMC Public Health,” “Social Behavior and Personality,” and “Personnel Review.” These journals aggregate a relatively large amount of research in the field of psychological capital.

According to the analysis of the productivity index, this paper further explores the concentration degree of PsyCap research at the author, institution, and country or region. Therefore, we present the top ten productive objects in Tables 1, 2.

In Table 1, we can see that the top three authors are Luthans F (42), Wang L (25), Avey JB (20), Kawachi I (20), and Lindstrom M (20). Among them, Luthans F and Avey JB have more cooperation, and the research direction is the same, that is, positive PsyCap. Kawachi I focused on the relationship between social capital and mental health. Wang Y, Li Y, and Liu L are concerned with the moderating or mediating effects of PsyCap. Lindstrom M analyzes the role of PsyCap on the population-based. Brunetto Y is more interested in COVID-19 and innovation. Kim M introduces the element of PsyCap into the sports field.

Table 2 shows the top 10 most productive affiliations. They are the University of London, University of Nebraska System, Harvard University, University of Nebraska Lincoln, University of California System, University of North Carolina, University of Texas System, Monash University, China Medical University, and Australian National University. Among them, one is from England, six come from the USA, two are from Australia, and one is from China. We can be seen that the USA, China, England, and Australia are the most productive countries or regions.

The co-citation network can present the knowledge base of PsyCap research concretely. Therefore, we perform co-citation network analysis and clustering based on the Cite-Space tool for the 118,972 documents involved in this field, and the results are shown in Figure 5. Each node represents literature, and the size of the node corresponds to the number of literature citations. And the larger the node, the more citations the literature has received. The thickness of the connecting lines between nodes reflects the strength of association in the literature.

Table 5 lists the 10 most cited references sorted by the co-citation numbers. Specifically, the classical document that has the most co-citations is “Meta-analysis of the impact of positive PsyCap on employee attitudes, behaviors, and performance” by Avey et al. (2011), published in Human Resource Development Quarterly. This paper has 177 citations, which means that it plays an important role in the research of PsyCap. And this paper quantitatively analyzed the impact of PsyCap on employee attitudes, behaviors, and performance.

Rank at second place in the knowledge bases of PsyCap studies, the paper “PsyCap: A review and synthesis” is a classic literature review, authored by Newman et al. (2014), and published by the Journal of Organizational Behavior. This paper provided a summary of the literature on PsyCap, which provides an important reference for subsequent research. Thus, it has 172 citations.

The third-ranked literature is a literature review that comprehensively reviewed the measurement methods, theoretical mechanism, antecedents and consequences, analysis level, and research status of PsyCap. It has 170 citations, authored by Luthans and Youssef-Morgan (2017), and printed by the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.

The remaining seven articles are devoted to specific studies. Among them, Luthans et al. (2007) used resilience, optimism, effectiveness, and their composite indicators to predict job performance and satisfaction. Luthans et al. (2010) examined the impact of PsyCap interventions on human resource development and performance management. Luthans et al. (2008a) discovered that training interventions can develop positive PsyCap through a randomized trial. Avey et al. (2010a) identified the potential added value of PsyCap in predicting work attitudes and behaviors. Avey et al. (2009) studied the relationship between PsyCap and occupational stress, and found that PsyCap can counteract the negative effects of job stress. Avey et al. (2010b) examined the dynamic relationship between PsyCap and employee well-being. Luthans et al. (2008b) examined the relationship between PsyCap and employee outcomes. The results of the study showed that PsyCap was positively related to employee performance, satisfaction, and commitment.

Overall, the 10 most cited papers in PsyCap research are concerned about the effects of positive PsyCap on work behavior, work attitudes, and employee performance. Among them, there are four articles with Avey J B as the first author and five articles with Luthans F as the first author. These two authors have co-authored eight articles in the top 10 most cited references.

In addition, we further analyze the clustering information in Figure 5 can be found: In cluster “#0 positive organizational behavior,” Avey (2014), Newman et al. (2014), Youssef-Morgan and Luthans (2015), and Luthans and Youssef-Morgan (2017), are the crucial documents. And these documents are dedicated to sorting out and summarizing the theories, methods, and norms of PsyCap research from different directions. Nevertheless, cluster “#1 positive organizational behavior” is led by Luthans and Youssef (2007), Luthans et al. (2007), Luthans et al. (2008a), and so on, which focus on the impact of positive PsyCap on organizational behavior. In cluster “#2 work outcome,” literature such as Avey et al., 2010a,b and Avey et al. (2011), deeply explore the impact of positive PsyCap on performance. The cluster “#4 university teachers,” cluster “#5 work engagement,” cluster “#8 work-family conflict,” cluster “#11creativity,” and cluster “#14 COVID-19” are all core themes of PsyCap research, among which “COVID-19” is a new research hotspot.

A systematic review and scrutiny of the relevant literature help to understand the progress of research, thus further complementing and refining the concepts and theories of PsyCap and standardizing research guidelines. These studies promote the healthy development of research in the field. Meanwhile, literature reviews usually analyze and summarize current research hotspots and future research directions, which to a certain extent point the way for research in the field. Therefore, there is no lack of literature review articles in PsyCap.

126 hot-cited references are obtained using burst point detection in the Cite-Space. We select these kinds of literature with the strongest citation burst ending in 2020–2022, displayed in Table 6, for a total of 45 articles. Analyzing them can further help us to understand the hot directions within the field of PsyCap in recent years.

Dawkins et al. (2013) provided a comprehensive analysis and review of the theoretical conceptualization and psychometric properties of PsyCap and proposed six indicators to advance PsyCap research. Scholars have expanded the scope of empirical research on PsyCap by recognizing the emotional, cognitive, and motivational psychological states associated with creativity and innovation (Anderson et al., 2014). Thereafter, Newman et al. (2014) sorted out the factors affecting the development of PsyCap from the perspective of empirical analysis and the results of different levels of research. Halbesleben et al. (2014) expanded the theoretical study of PsyCap by combing the literature on resource conservation theory and suggesting the introduction of psychology and management. Underpinning these theoretical and empirical guides, the impact analysis, mediating effects, and practical applications of PsyCap have been further developed, with a comprehensive compendium and elaboration by Luthans and Youssef-Morgan (2017). With the focus on individual characteristics in the field of PsyCap, Nolzen (2018) called for researchers to further investigate the relationship between emotions and PsyCap, and suggests analyzing the effects of PsyCap in the context of strategic human resource management. In addition, Podsakoff et al. (2012) explored studies on the methodological bias, and Hayes and Scharkow (2013) recommend bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals as mediated analyses for the most trustworthy tests, which provide technical support for empirical studies of PsyCap.

The above meta-analysis of the literature shows that there has been much research on positive PsyCap and performance, behavior, and attitudes (e.g., satisfaction, commitment, happiness, and willingness to leave). Among them, the research based on individual objects: (1) the influential relationship or mediating role between employees’ PsyCap and job demands (Chen and Lim, 2012; Bakker and Demerouti, 2017), job satisfaction (Bergheim et al., 2015; Jung and Yoon, 2015; Karatepe and Karadas, 2015), well-being (Luthans et al., 2013; Youssef-Morgan and Luthans, 2015), performance/innovation performance (Abbas and Raja, 2015; Paek et al., 2015; Mathe et al., 2017; Alessandri et al., 2018), job stress (Laschinger and Fida, 2014; Li et al., 2015), and creativity (Rego et al., 2012; Huang and Luthans, 2015; Hsu and Chen, 2017); (2) the effect or mediating role of students’ PsyCap on academic performance (Luthans et al., 2012; Siu et al., 2014; Datu et al., 2018; Carmona et al., 2019), satisfaction (Ortega-Maldonado and Salanova, 2018), and stress (Riolli et al., 2012); (3) the moderating effect of PsyCap on health care workers on family conflict (Wang et al., 2012), performance (Sun et al., 2012), and job burnout (Peng et al., 2013; Ding et al., 2015).

Research based on teams and organizations, for example, Heled et al. (2016) explored the mediating effect of team PsyCap on learning climate, learning outcomes, job satisfaction, and team organizational behavior. Focus on the current special social environment, COVID is a research hotspot in the field of PsyCap. Brooks et al. (2020) found that after the outbreak of coronavirus disease in December 2019, the psychological impact brought by quarantine was extensive and substantial. Cao et al. (2020) studied the impact of COVID-19 on college students’ PsyCap.

Research on PsyCap metrics and nurturing interventions are also a research priority. Avey (2014) conducted two separate empirical studies of 1,264 engineers and technicians, and 529 Chinese scientists and technicians from an individual psychological perspective and found that individual differences, leadership ability, and job characteristics were strong predictors of PsyCap. Results from the Luthans et al. (2014) experimental study provide preliminary support that short-term training interventions can positively impact the academic PsyCap of business students. These two papers focused on short-term interventions for PsyCap, and Russo and Stoykova (2015) further explored the long-term effects of these approaches.

In bibliometrics, keyword co-occurrence is used to identify research trends. We employ Cite-Space to generate a keyword co-occurrence network for PsyCap, illustrated in Figure 6. Furthermore, we can find 9 clusters, which are formed based on the keyword co-occurrence network. The specific information on clustering is further presented in Table 7 and Figure 6.

From the observation of Figure 6, we can see that cluster “#0 social capital” and cluster “#1 Psychological Capital” are the largest clusters, containing more keywords, and they are more closely connected. Cluster “#0 social capital” includes 77 keywords, cluster “#1 Psychological Capital” has 68 keywords, and cluster “#2 death penalty” contains 29 keywords. Cluster “#3 fertility intentions,” cluster “#4 well-being,” cluster “#5 information,” cluster “#6 spouse abuse,” cluster “#7 shared cognitions,” cluster “#8 career orientations” contain 23, 20, 20, 13, 10, 4 keywords, respectively. And the cluster “#8 career orientations” is the smallest cluster, which only has four keywords, including “labor,” “flow,” “succe” and “coping.” Table 7 lists the top five co-occurrence keywords with the highest frequency in each cluster.

Furthermore, we obtain 60 hot keywords using burst point detection in the Cite-Space (Ping et al., 2017). We highlighted the ten keywords with the greatest strength. The hot keywords generated during the steady growth (1970–2007) stage are “Self-rated health” (the strength is 11.21, begin at 2007, end and in 2016), “social capital” (10.58, 1999–2006), “Mortality” (10.3, 2000–2015) and “Women” (9.70, 2005–2015). The hot keywords generated during the rapid growth stage (2008–2017) are “Trust” (12.83, 2008–2016), “Positive organizational behavior” (11.42, 2010–2018), “Children” (10.64, 2012–2018) and “Organizational behavior” (9.96, 2010–2017). The others generated during the third stage (2018–2022) are “Nurse” (12.55, 2020–2022) and “Motivation” (9.97, 2019–2020). Noted that “Nurse” is a current hot topic of research in PsyCap. Among the related researches, the moderating effect of psychological capital on nurses in the workplace is a research priority. The literature related to the keyword “motivation” focuses on the relationship between psychological capital and the behavioral motivation of various workplace personnel, such as Datu et al. (2018), Xu et al. (2021), and Li et al. (2022).