Journal of Informetrics 2007–2023: A Retrospective Bibliometric Analysis

Founded in 2007, Journal of Informetrics (JOI) is one of the authoritative journals in the research area of computer science, information science and library science. In this study, 1,208 JOI publications published between 2007 and 2023 were retrieved from Web of Science (WoS) for retrospective bibliometric analysis. First, performance analysis based on classic bibliometric indicators is carried out to identify the annual publication trends, citation structures, most cited papers, and leading authors/institutions/countries/territories. Second, the visual co-citation network of JOI generated by VOSviewer is applied to analyze its citation connections. Finally, a new knowledge diffusion trajectory mining method based on the citation network is proposed to discover the knowledge diffusion paths of JOI, while the keyword co-occurrence analysis is conducted to uncover the evolutionary traits of research topics. This study systematically provides a retrospective bibliometric analysis of JOI, and comprehensively explores the potential structure in JOI. Generally, this will help researchers interested in JOI to better understand its development and research patterns.