Link Prediction in Social Networks: A Bibliometric Analysis and Review of Literature (1987-2021)

Link prediction (LP) has become a hot topic in the data mining, machine learning, and deep learning community. This study aims to implement bibliometric analysis to find the current status of the LP studies and investigate it from different perspectives. The present study provides a Scopus-based bibliometric overview of the LP studies landscape since 1987 when LP studies were published for the first time. Various kinds of analysis, including document, subject, and country distribution are applied. Moreover, author productivity, citation analysis, and keyword analysis is used, and Bradford’s law is applied to discover the main journals in this field. Most documents were published by conferences in the field. The majority of LP documents have been published in the computer science and mathematics fields. So far, China has been at the forefront of publishing countries. In addition, the most active sources of LP publications are lecture notes in Computer Science, including subseries lecture notes in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and lecture notes in Bioinformatics, and IEEE Access. The keyword analysis demonstrates that while social networks had attracted attention in the early period, knowledge graphs have attracted more attention, recently. Since the LP problem has been approached recently using machine learning (ML), the current study may inform researchers to concentrate on ML techniques. This is the first bibliometric study of “link prediction” literature and provides a broad landscape of the field.