Mapping the literature on anxiety associated with information related tasks: A scientometric analysis

Abstract

This research carried out a scientometric analysis of literature on anxiety associated with information-related tasks to determine its periodic growth, language dispersion, publication format, authorship patterns, and geographic origin. Four relevant databases (Web of Science, Scopus, LISTA, and LISA) were searched along with scanning of references of full-text papers to identify 381 related citations. The data set was analyzed using several bibliographic characteristics. The results showed that the volume of literature began to increase from the year 1986 and continued at a steady pace up to 2000. A phenomenal increase in the output was noticed in the 21st century with a per-year average of 16 publications till 2019. The majority of documents were for journal papers from the LIS field. English was the dominant language. More than half of the journal papers were published by only 27 journals. One-fourth of the journals produced a little less than two-thirds of the papers. A little less than half of the literature was the result of collaborative effort. A small core of authors produced more than one-third of the literature. UK and USA appeared as the leading contributors in the journal papers as well as all publications. The results are beneficial to scholars in several disciplines as they provides an interesting insight into the research trends by creating awareness about core authors, core journals, and core areas publishing this literature. These results also encourage researchers to initiate collaborative and inter-disciplinary research. This study makes a worthy contribution to this research area as no such a comprehensive study is available so far.