Bibliometric analysis of fake news indexed in Web of Science and Scopus (2001-2020)

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the scholarly contribution of literature published on the much-hyped term fake news and associated terms such as misinformation, disinformation and post-truth in various disciplines, which contributes heavily to information disorder. Design/methodology/approach The study conducted a bibliometric inquiry of literature published in Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases (2001-2020) and steered in-depth quantitative content analysis of top-cited publications. The data mining covers 1,776 and 1,056 publications from WoS and Scopus databases, respectively. Bibliometrix R-package, VOSviewer Software tool and Microsoft Excel were used for analysis. Findings The study concluded that the past seven years (2014–2020) are the most productive period in studying fake news and its associated terms due to the unprecedented rise of social media and digital media. The prominent themes of the study were conducted in political, health, technology, media and social media space, whereas the output is minor in the pure science field. It is also inferred that both databases are contributing consistently in the domain of fake news literature. Practical implications The study helps in expansion of knowledge based on the research topic as well as in understanding the evolution of fake news in support of further research in this area. Originality/value Mapping scholarly contributions of scientific research provides a guiding approach and helps counter the information chaos stimulated by fake news phenomena in the digital era.

Digital Transformation and Open Innovation Planning of Response to COVID-19 Outbreak: A Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Agenda

“…The most prominent cluster labels generated by LLR, LSI and MI are social media, COVID-19 pandemic and 19-derived pandemic, respectively. The literature most closely related to this category is the study of Patra et al (2022) [23] The mentioned study discussed the evolution of fake news during COVID-19, and proposed implementation strategies to deal with information chaos in the digital era. The three keywords with the highest frequency in this category are information (297), social media (275) and communication (135).…”

“…While other isolated nodes do not form a reference relationship in the figure, these articles have potential topic coupling relationships and reflect different digitalization directions. [18][19][20][21][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]41,42,[44][45][46][47][48][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][65][66][67][68][69] were included and the articles [22,23,49,64] were not included. The left axis of the figure shows the publishing year of the nodes, whic...…”

“…After the outbreak in 2020, the impact of the epidemic on various aspects of a region has received more attention, such as the impact on the education system [44], the impact on the commercial system [52] and the multiple impacts on the manufacturing industry and the economy [51]. In addition, the application of digital technology could also create a series of challenges, such as the false news prevalence on social media [23] and the financial burden and travel restrictions brought by telemedicine [27].…”

“…Core literature citation network based on CitNetExplorer. Representative articles[18- 21,24-30,32-39,41,42,44-48,50-63,65-69] were included and the articles[22,23,49,64] were not included. The left axis of the figure shows the publishing year of the nodes, which are labeled with the name of the first author.…”

Disinformation: A Bibliometric Review

“…The review of Tito et al and Yeung et al limited disinformation to the social media [ 63 ] and medical fields [ 64 ], respectively, and although these two fields are the main sites of disinformation, they limit the grasp of the filed in its entirety. The review of Patra et al summarized the existing results comprehensively to some extent, but rarely tapped into research hotspots and research trends that are directly related to disinformation [ 65 ]. Taken collectively, a comprehensive and objective analysis of the field of disinformation and an overview of the frontiers of development are lacking.…”