The Scientific Study of Meditation
the Meditation Research Bibliography – developed and maintained by Peter Malinowski, founder and director of the Meditation and Mindfulness Research Group at Liverpool John Moores University
The interest in meditation research is increasing exponentially and it starts becoming a challenge to keep abreast of these developments. I started this bibliography project to support everybody who is looking for scientific studies into buddhist meditation.
Currently I am in the process of moving the bibliography from its old location at www.pmalinowski.de to its new place, where it is fitted with expanded functionality. This process will take some time, as it involves adding tags to each entry. I hope it’ll be worth the while.
Mindfulness literature
The focus of this bibliography is research that increases our scientific understanding of the processes underlying meditation practices. There are numerous studies evaluating the efficacy of various mindfulness-based interventions (MBSR, MBCT etc.) for a wide range of clinical and non-clinical populations. These are immensely important regarding the application of mindfulness-based approaches, but do not necessarily provide direct information about the meditation practice or the underlying processes. Studies focusing primarily on evaluating the efficacy are thus usually not included here. Also, there seems to be no need to duplicate the wonderful work done by David Black, who set up the mindfulness research guide. Its monthly newsletter provides regular updates of the latest mindfulness research.
Your contribution
As almost all of the articles are (also) published electronically I try to provide the links to these publications. In many cases access to respective online journals will be limited to subscriptions, but I try to also link to freely available versions of the article, for instance on the personal webpage of the authors.
You can contribute to this bibliography by sending me references of articles that are not yet listed here, and/or hyperlinks to already listed articles, especially if they are publicly available.
Please also report ‘dead’ links if you should come across any on this page.
Do you know of other articles not included here? A new publication you would like to see included as soon as possible? – No problem, just use the contact form to send me the reference and I’ll add it (assumed it is relevant).
I welcome all feedback on this page and hope that it is as useful to others as the bibliography is to me.
Meditation Research Blog: And if you are interested in some information and thought around the scientific work, subscribe to my Meditation Research Blog. When specific publications in this bibliography are discussed in the blog, you will find a link to the blog entry, too.