Bibliometrics of sentiment analysis literature

Abstract

This article provides a bibliometric study of the sentiment analysis literature based on Web of Science (WoS) until the end of 2016 to evaluate current research trends, quantitatively and qualitatively. We concentrate on the analysis of scientific documents, distribution of subject categories, languages of documents and languages that have been more investigated in sentiment analysis, most prolific and impactful authors and institutions, venues of publications and their geographic distribution, most cited and hot documents, trends of keywords and future works. Our investigations demonstrate that the most frequent subject categories in this field are computer science, engineering, telecommunications, linguistics, operations research and management science, information science and library science, business and economics, automation and control systems, robotics and social sciences. In addition, the most active venue of publication in this field is Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). The United States, China and Singapore have the most prolific or impactful institutions. A keyword analysis demonstrates that sentiment analysis is a more accepted term than opinion mining. Twitter is the most used social network for sentiment analysis and Support Vector Machine (SVM) is the most used classification method. We also present the most cited and hot documents in this field and authors’ suggestions for future works.