Bibliometric Analysis of Rumor Propagation Research Through Web of Science from 1989 to 2019

With the development of various social networking platforms, the spread of rumors has become more and more rapidly and has received more and more attention from scholars for the hazards it may cause. However, the existing studies rarely review the research status and explore the research trends in the field of rumor propagation from a systematic perspective, which provides motivation for us to carry out this work. Therefore, we use CiteSpace software to perform the bibliometric analysis of 970 articles about rumor propagation in the core collection database of Web of Science from 1989 to 2019. First, we examine the time and spatial distribution to describe the time trends of articles and the contribution of countries to the field of rumor propagation. Second, we analyze the authors and co-cited authors to show the collaboration between authors, the most productive and influential authors. Then, we perform the source journals and co-cited journals analysis to demonstrate the most important journals. Further, we analyze the keywords co-occurrence to explore the evolution of hot topics over time. Finally, we conduct the document co-citation analysis to identify the intellectual bases and emerging trends. This article can be served as a review of rumor propagation research to help researchers carry out in-depth research in the future.