From a design research perspective, affective engineering’s disciplinary scope remains ambiguous due to its interdisciplinary nature. To situate the Int. J. Affect. Eng. (IJAE) in the broader design research landscape, we analysed 229 IJAE papers within a corpus of 61,673 design research papers published in 38 Web of Science-indexed journals. We show that IJAE has the lowest citation impact in this set. We further reveal IJAE’s lowest country diversity and predominantly Japan-based authorship despite the international scope implied by the journal’s title. Using UMAP on title-and-abstract text embeddings, we show that IJAE’s topic distribution is comparatively broad and centred mainly on interaction design and ergonomics. Finally, we identify a compact Kansei-related cluster (“Kansei Island”). Overall, we identify IJAE as a Japan-led, low-impact, thematically omnivorous interaction design journal, anchored by a compact Kansei-related core.
M. Matsui (Thu,) studied this question.