Research Productivity and Network Visualization on Digital Evidence: A Bibliometric Study

ABSTRACT

The present study focuses on evaluating the research productivity in the domain of digital evidence using various bibliometric indicators. Total 4458 scientific publications were retrieved from Scopus database from period 1889 to 2020 applying related keyword search. The results were presented in tabular and graphical form. Study also used VOSviewer© tool to evaluate the network visualization and discovered the collaboration and relationship with authors, coauthors, countries, institutions, co-occurrence of keywords, and co-citation of cited references in the subject domain digital evidence. The result revealed that growing trends of total publications in last 10 years of research. Of total 4458 scientific publications, 40,936 total citations were found with 9.18 average citation per publication. UK and USA were top-productive country in terms of publishing research in the field, and Czech Republic and Switzerland have produced more prolific authors. University van Pretoria, Masaryk University and University of South Australia were reported top three productive organizations in the realm of digital evidence. Study also observed collaboration and cooperation between authors, country, and organizations in the visualization analysis. The results of co-occurrence of keywords were reported that digital evidence, digital forensics, computer forensics, and digital investigation were found frequently used keywords and have maximum link strength.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital evidence
• electronic evidence
• bibliometrics
• citation analysis
• scientometrics
• VOSviewer©