THE LITERATURE ON REFERENCE MANAGEMENT TOOLS: A BIBLIOMETRIC REFLECTION

The paper aims to provide a bibliometric overview of the literature on reference management tools available on the Web of Science (WoS). Our choice of a bibliometric approach is significant, as it allows us to comprehensively study the literature available on WoS. We utilized a Biblioshiny app to analyze the data retrieved from WoS, further enhancing the depth of our research. The findings revealed that the literature on reference management tools is continuously growing. However, some areas still need to be explored through research. The average citation per document is calculated as 12.7. Bradford's core zone contained eight journals, in which 73 documents were published. Thelwal M, Volkov L P and Dorokhov I N are the most prominent authors publishing on reference management tools. Authorship pattern revealed a trend towards single authorship. The United Kingdom, USA, Netherlands, Canada and Germany were the most cited countries. The top ten highly cited documents shared 43.10% of citations. The conceptual study revealed the leading themes in the literature on reference management tools. The current study is the first direct bibliometric study on reference management tools. It's important to note that our study is limited in that it only covers the literature available in WoS. However, we recognize this limitation and believe that upcoming studies might include Scopus or other indexing databases to provide more generalized results.