Unraveling the foundations and the evolution of conceptual modeling—Intellectual structure, current themes, and trajectories

Abstract

The field of conceptual modeling has now been in existence for over five decades. To understand how this field has evolved and should continue to evolve, it is useful to examine the contributions made over time and the themes that have emerged. In this research, we apply bibliometric analysis to a corpus of over 4700 research papers spanning from 1976 to 2023. We successively apply co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and main path analysis. Co-citation and citation networks are produced that surface the intellectual structure of the field, the main themes, and the relationships among major and influential research papers over time. We identify four areas in the intellectual structure of the field: conceptual modeling and databases; grammars and guidelines for conceptual modeling; requirements engineering and information systems design methodologies; and ontology constructs for conceptual modeling. Between 2017 and 2023, we distinguish nine research themes, including domain-specific conceptual modeling and applications, ontologies and applications, genomics, and datastores and multi-model data. The main path analysis identifies several trajectories among the major and most influential papers. This leads to insights into the lineage of key, influential papers in conceptual modeling research. The primordial nature of the main paths identified encompasses two important aspects. The first revolves around refining and complementing the entity-relationship model. The second identifies the contribution of ontologies for conceptual modeling to make the models more robust. Based on the findings from this bibliometric analysis, we propose several directions for future conceptual modeling research.