Visibility, impact, and applications of bibliometric software tools through citation analysis

This study examines the visibility, impact, and applications of bibliometric software tools in the peer-reviewed literature through a “Cited Reference Search” using the Web of Science (WOS) database. A total of 2882 citing research articles to eight bibliometric software tools were extracted from the WOS Core Collection between 2010 and 2021. These citing articles are analyzed by publication year, country, publication title, publisher, open access level, funding agency, and WOS category. Mentions of bibliometric software tools in Author Keywords and KeyWords Plus are also compared. The VOSviewer software is utilized to identify specific research areas by discipline from the keyword co-occurrences of the citing articles. The findings reveal that while bibliometric software tools are making a noteworthy impact and contribution to research, their visibility through referencing, Author Keywords, and KeyWords Plus is limited. This study serves as a clarion call to raise awareness and initiate discussions on the citing practices of software tools in scholarly publications.