Towards a Bibliometric Mapping of Network Public Opinion Studies

To grasp the current status of network public opinion (NPO) research and explore the knowledge base and hot trends from a quantitative perspective, we retrieved 1385 related papers and conducted a bibliometric mapping analysis on them. Co-occurrence analysis, cluster analysis, co-citation analysis and keyword burst analysis were performed using VOSviewer and CiteSpace software. The results show that the NPO is mainly distributed in the disciplinary fields associated with journalism and communication and public management. There are four main hotspots: analysis of public opinion, analysis of communication channels, technical means and challenges faced. The knowledge base in the field of NPO research includes social media, user influence, and user influence related to opinion dynamic modeling and sentiment analysis. With the advent of the era of big data, big data technology has been widely used in various fields and to some extent can be said to be the research frontier in the field. Transforming big data public opinion into early warning, realizing in-depth analysis and accurate prediction of public opinion as well as improving decision-making ability of public opinion are the future research directions of NPO.