Research on metaphor processing during the past five decades: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Metaphor processing has been the subject of extensive research over the past five decades. A systematic review of metaphor processing publications through bibliometric tools can provide a clear overview of research on metaphor processing. In this study, we used the CiteSpace bibliometric tool to conduct a systematic review of publications related to metaphor processing. A total of 3271 works published and indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) were gathered. These works had been published between 1970 and 2022. We analyzed the co-citations of these works by CiteSpace to identify the most influential publications in metaphor processing research. A co-occurrence term analysis was done to identify dominant topics in this area of research. The results of this analysis showed that Language, comprehension, metaphor, figurative language, and context were the most frequent keywords. The most prominent clusters were students, figurative language, right hemisphere, embodied cognition, comprehension, N400, and anger. Based on the results of this analysis, we suggest that task properties such as response format and linguistic features should be carefully taken into account in future studies on metaphor processing.