Automatic algorithmic techniques: A complementary approach to narrative reviews

The measurement of creativity remains unsettled. While our understanding of creativity's current operationalization is limited, the present research addresses this issue via two novel computerized techniques. We first applied bibliometric mapping to creativity measurement literature and identified those major measurement approaches. Results were aligned with previous narrative reviews: there are indeed four major creativity measurement approaches, namely, person-, process-, product-, and press-focused approaches. Moreover, mapping and clustering displayed a trend from the traditional process-focused approach toward the product-based approach in recent years, pointing to a shift in creativity’s conceptualization. Secondly, we applied text analysis to a pool of empirical creativity articles published in the past decade (also gathered via a systematic search protocol) to see how creativity was operationalized. Results showed that product-based was the most common approach, followed by the process- and person-centered approaches. Furthermore, a notable amount of work combined multiple approaches to measuring creativity and incorporated both subjective and objective measures, suggesting that the measurement of creativity is becoming multi-faced. Besides contributing to research on creativity, we also demonstrated that computerized techniques could elaborate on the scientific value of narrative reviews.