Research on fake news: An empirical analysis of selected library and information science journals

Abstract

The purpose of the work is to make a quantitative and qualitative assessment of published research on fake news in light of the Library and Information Science (LIS) perspective and show the research trends. Essential metadata elements were collected from the SCOPUS bibliographic database pertaining to fake news with specific reference to the LIS domain from 2017 to 2020 for the research work and analysed as per the research objectives. While the bibliometric indicators and R package has been used to study the various quantitative dimensions of publication patterns of the research papers, qualitative content analysis has been used to determine the emerging areas of research on fake news within the discipline. The quantitative analysis reveals that a good number of research works (N=133) have been published in as many as 52 academic journals of LIS that received 628 citations. “Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology” is the most productive journal that published the highest numbers of articles on fake news, and the USA is the dominant country of publications. In the LIS field, “fake news” is an emerging study topic that is gaining momentum. The research works covered a wide range of topics, including social media and fake news, information literacy and fake news, the role of libraries and librarians in fake news, detecting and combating fake news, theories, models, and frameworks, as well as archiving, preservation of fake news.