A Scientometric Analysis of Fifty-One Years of Research on Knowledge Society (1970-2021)

Purpose - This paper aims to examine the trends of Knowledge society (KS) research, discuss the knowledge structure and analyze the current research hot spots in KS field for the period 1970-2021. Design/methodology/approach – The bibliographic data of 3108 scientific documents indexed in the Scopus database were retrieved for the period 1970 to 2021(till March). Two data analytics and visualization software i.e., VOSviewer (VV) - desktop app and Biblioshiny - a web-interface for Bibliometrix R-package was used to explore and understand the various bibliometric and scientometric indicators including prolific authors, affiliations, cited documents, co-authorship and co-citation analysis apart from network mapping. Findings – The findings indicated a positive growth trend in the publications from 2004 to 2013 followed by a decline. The top contributing author was Garcia-Penalvo, F.J. (University of Salamanca, Spain). The three-fold analysis of KS publications revealed that the institutions from Spain published more on the topics related to KS research. “Communications in Computer and Information Science” found to be the core journal in which most of the KS literature has been published. Originality/value - The insights accumulated from this study will provide stakeholders a glimpse of the contributions and advancement of “Knowledge Society” field and bring forth the directions for future scientific endeavors