Half a Century of Information Processing & Management: A bibliometric retrospective

Abstract

Established in 1963 under the title Information Storage and Retrieval, the journal adopted its current name, Information Processing & Management (IPM), in 1975, reflecting a broadening scope aligned with computational and cognitive developments in information science. This study uses data from Web of Science and Scopus databases to deliver a longitudinal, multi-perspective bibliometric and science mapping analysis of IPM’s evolution from 1963 to 2023. Employing co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, keyword co-occurrence, and thematic mapping via VOSviewer and Bibliometrix, the analysis delineates the structural, conceptual, and topical transformation of the journal content. Co-citation networks uncover foundational cores in information retrieval, relevance theory, and evaluation methodologies, while also revealing temporal shifts toward natural language processing, deep learning, and social media analytics. Bibliographic coupling identifies coherent intellectual clusters centered on GNN-based recommendation systems, blockchain-secured infrastructures, and sentiment-aware retrieval frameworks. Keyword co-occurrence and topic evolution trajectories illustrate the journal’s recent pivot toward transformer models, misinformation detection, ethical AI, and interdisciplinary convergence across cognitive science, machine learning, and computational linguistics. Regional co-word analysis underscores epistemological diversity and geographic differentiation across North America, Europe, and East Asia. Productivity and influence metrics highlight the ascent of East Asian institutions and the emergence of globally distributed citation impact. Finally, SciVal-based topic and topic cluster analyses reveal the journal’s role in advancing highly cited research (as measured by FWCI) in areas such as ABSA, multi-view clustering, and health informatics. This work not only charts IPM’s conceptual landscape and disciplinary diffusion but also provides actionable intelligence on the journal’s strategic positioning within the broader information and computational sciences.