Overview of Misinformation and Disinformation Research from 1971 to 2022

Background

As social media has developed, it has become much easier for individuals to disseminate information with less effort, expense and filtration. Because of the damage it does to communities, this long-standing issue of fake news has become increasingly worrying.

Objectives

The study’s goal is to create a comprehensive map of the existing literature on misinformation and disinformation by analyzing its structure, tracking its evolution through time and discovering emerging trends.

Materials and Methods

Several databases, including Web of Science and Scopus, were searched for appropriate keywords to pull up the articles published between 1971 and 2022. After removing duplicates and performing normalization, a total of 21,407 articles were analyzed using R software.

Results

Journals reported a total of 21,407 articles, 13829 author keywords and 9394 keywords plus. In addition, only 1852 of the 12852 authors that contributed to these works were sole authors, giving a total collaboration coefficient of 3.06. Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling, Sustainability and Library Philosophy and Practice have all been cited as major venues for misinformation and outright lies.

Conclusion

This study is one of the first to use scientometric methods to the analysis of disinformation and fake news from a strategic perspective. The data showed an increasing trend in articles from 1971 to 2022, with a sudden peak in 2021, which may imply an increase in the dissemination of disinformation and deceit. In addition, different time periods (1971-2020) revealed novel strategic themes. Based on the results of the cluster analysis, it is clear that scholars have paid the most attention to the factors that contribute to the proliferation of misinformation. Further data analysis reveals that digital media literacy and artificial intelligence are the primary study foci areas. Misinformation and disinformation were also linked to social media, AI and open access on the thematic map. This study’s findings added new information that aided in answering some of the most pressing academic questions about the evolution of misinformation and deception. They can be utilized as a roadmap for further study in this area.