How Moral Injury Research Has Grown and Who Is Leading It

A study looked at all the papers that mention “moral injury” from 1992 to 2025. The researchers used three ways to find the papers: searching titles, keywords and abstracts together; only abstracts; or just titles. Each method gave a different number of papers, showing that how you search matters. The research found 2, 081 papers. Most were regular articles, but there were also reviews, book chapters and editorials. The number of papers stayed low until 2017. After that, the field exploded and reached a peak in 2025. The United States published the most papers. The UK, Canada and Australia followed. In the U. S. , two researchers—S. Maguen with 36 papers and H. G. Koenig with 34—were the top writers. In the UK, N. Greenberg and D. Murphy each wrote 37 and 36 papers respectively. Canada’s leaders were M. C. McKinnon (23) and A. Nazarov (21). In Australia, L. B. Carey had 13 papers and A. Nickerson had 10.

Key institutions include the VA Medical Center, King’s College London, Western University, McMaster University, Duke University Medical Center and Boston University’s medical school. The most popular journals are “Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, ” the “European Journal of Psychotraumatology, ” “Traumatology, ” “Frontiers in Psychiatry” and the “Journal of Religion and Health. ” The study also grouped research topics. Ten main themes emerged: how moral injury affects mental health, its role in military and healthcare settings, ethical questions, ways to measure it, and treatments. Looking at the 100 most cited papers highlighted five core ideas: how to think about moral injury, how to measure it, its impact on mental health, and different ways to help people. The authors note that how you search changes what papers show up. This means some researchers or countries might be under‑represented in the data. Still, the study points out who is doing most of the work and what topics are most important in moral injury research.

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