Bibliometric Analysis of Global Research Trends and Future Research Directions on Social Presence

Purpose – This study aims to identify and classify the most relevant works in the social presence literature to provide insight into the most promising research areas and global research trends and to help future researchers find the most relevant information based on their research interests.

Design/methodology/approach – The study provides a bibliometric analysis of 1962 journal articles published between 1958 and 2022 based on publication outputs, co-authorships among authors and affiliated countries, and co-occurrences of author keywords referenced in the Scopus database.

Findings – There has been a steady increase in the cumulative number of publications between 2014 and 2018, with an increase of 100 articles per year. Over 55% of the total publications worldwide were contributed by researchers from China and the United States. In addition, four of the most productive universities in each of the 15 leading countries are ranked among the world's top 100 universities.  Research on social presence addresses some interesting topics such as e-learning, social media, computer-mediated communication (CMC), and community of inquiry (CoI).

This bibliometric analysis was conducted to identify trends in the area of social presence. As a result of this study, the publication global trend was identified, which is likely to continue to increase in the future. Co-authorship and co-occurrence analyses were also performed to evaluate the countries that are leading the way as well as keywords used in the literature.