Exploring worldwide research trends on fake news through a bibliometric and visual analysis

The present study aimed to scrutinize how fake news have been explored in worldwide scientific articles over the recent years. By employing bibliometric techniques and extracting 1,844 articles from the Web of Science database published between 2013 and 2024, this study attempted to explore different perspectives in fake news researches to obtain understanding of research collaborations among authors, affiliations, and countries, research trends and emerging frontiers related to fake news. R packages including ‘Bibliometrix’ analyzed bibliometric features, visualized international collaborations among different countries, and outlined their volume of publications. VOSviewer was employed to analyze co-authorship across authors, affiliations, and countries, and co-occurrence of keywords. VOSviewer also visualized the analyses with overlay network to display changes of research trends in different periods. And CiteSpace was used to visualize the citation burst of references.