Five decades of journalism ethics research: A comprehensive bibliometric analysis

This study examines journalism ethics research over the past five decades. To this effect, a bibliometric analysis was conducted on around 2000 published peer-reviewed articles between 1973 and 2024. The articles were retrieved from Scopus database and were authored by 3229 scholars. The findings suggest that there is an exponential growth of scholarly articles in journalism ethics research, especially during the last decade. The study also identifies trending themes, topics that may be losing their relevance, top authors, top institutions and top countries, most cited research articles as well as co-occurrence networks along with thematic evolution of journalism ethics research. The study also uses reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) to detect the ‘historical roots’ of journalism ethics. Findings suggest that rapid growth in journalism ethics research has been noticed since 2013. Findings also suggest that misinformation, fact-checking, artificial intelligence, fake news are hot topics in journalism ethics while regulations, press council themes are losing relevance. This study contributes to growing research that focuses on identifying trends and key concepts in journalism.