Visual Analysis of the Research Context of Opinion Leaders Based on CiteSpace

Since 2000, an increasing number of studies of opinion leaders has analyzed their roles from different perspectives in a wide range of industries. However, few studies had attempted to comprehensively review the existing literature in the past. The purpose of this research is to map the thread and skeleton of the research on opinion leaders from 2000 to 2021. A total of 3,872 related articles have been collected from Wos for scientometrics analysis. The research results show that (1) The research literature on opinion leaders has been in the ascending stage all along, and scholars remain enthusiastic on this research. (2) The most significant contributions mainly come from the United States, Britain, Canada, China, and Australia, but showing no high cooperation intensity. (3) According to the keyword time zone view, it is found that, with the development of time, its influence is gradually reflected on the internet with the development of science and technology. (4) Nine research classifications are able to be drawn in cluster analysis. By using Citespace software, this study is to analyze the last 20-year literature on opinion leaders and sort out their development context, while the data used in this study is merely retrieved from the WoS core database. The boundaries of this study, in the future, could be expanded by considering other types of databases and documents so as to integrate a more comprehensive knowledge map of opinion leaders.