The Fake News Phenomenon in the Scientific Debate: Evidence from a Bibliometric Analysis

Navigating the vast sea of information in the digital age poses significant challenges, espe cially when it comes to discerning fake news from authentic information. This intricate task becomes even more challenging when the fake news is artfully presented as truth. Fake news often disguises itself as credible content and, by rapidly proliferating on digital platforms, contributes to increasing information disorder. This paper aims to investigate how the fake news phenomenon and its related issues have been addressed in the scientific literature. To achieve this objective, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of 3098 scientific publications extracted from the Web of Science from 2005 to 2022. This approach allowed us to identify the conceptual structure of fake news, including the different themes, and understand how they are interconnected in the field of fake news study. Additionally, we examined the intellectual structure based on the co-citations of key journals addressing this topic. The results of this research revealed an increase in the volume of fake news publications, coinciding with a rise in citations among the authors of the selected articles. Furthermore, we found that the conceptual structure of fake news is characterised by an interdisciplinary nature, which revolves mainly around sociopolitical dynamics and public health, with the latter particularly influenced by the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the intellectual structure uncovered by the journals’ co-citation network highlights the presence of two main subfields: communication and political debate and the behavioural domain