A bibliometric study of the applied linguistics research output of Saudi institutions in the Web of Science for the decade 2011-2020

Purpose This paper aims to analyse the research contributions of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the field of applied linguistics (AL) indexed in the Web of Science core collection for the period between 2011 and 2020. Design/methodology/approach The author searched key terms in the Social Science Citation Index and Science Citation Index Expanded categories that publish documents in AL. The author compiled the data, classified these documents according to their research focus and investigated different metrics such as keywords analysis, citation analysis, overseas collaboration and productivity over authors, institutions and sources by using VOSviewer and Excel sheet. Findings Results found that publications in Saudi Arabia have tremendously increased around three times in the years 2016–2020 than before. As unexpected, highly cited researchers, sources and institutions for the social science and arts and humanities disciplines were higher than the scientific disciplines that investigated linguistic issues such as neurology, audiology and computer science. The area of language teaching and learning was the most researched area in which the highly cited author, journals and keywords analysis metrics occurred within its scope. The highly cited articles were those that collaborated with the world contributing authors and acted as corresponding authors. Originality/value The study contributes to the body of literature of AL which shares other categories that investigated language as a central issue. The study provides a fine-grained picture about the research productivity of AL in scientific and social science categories in Saudi Arabia.