The Impact of Term Fake News on the Scientific Community. Scientific Performance and Mapping in Web of Science

Abstract

Nowadays, multiple phenomena have promoted an impact on society, constituting in some cases, not only a contribution of benefits but also of risks. Among them, the fake news phenomenon is considered one of the most burning phenomena today due to the risk it poses to society. In view of this situation, the research community has carried out numerous studies that seek to address this issue from a multidisciplinary perspective. Based on this, the objective of this work was to analyze the productivity and, therefore, the impact of this topic in the research community. To this end, this work advocated a scientometric-type methodology, through scientometric laws, impact indicators, and scientific evolution of 640 publications of the web of science (WOS). The results showed the impact of the fake news discipline today, which is considered an emerging issue that is of interest to many knowledge disciplines around the world. Likewise, the results showed that the publications not only have a focus on analyzing the veracity or not of the news, but that it begins to vertebrate a new line of an investigation directed to the informational education and towards the prevention of the consumption of this type of news through the internet.

Sentiment Analysis for Fake News Detection

“…The interest of the research community in disinformation and misinformation has increased in recent years, with a steady growth in the number of publications on rumors since 2006 [19]. In the case of fake news, there were few publications before 2016, but a rapid growth started in 2017 that has led fake news to become the most important research subject on these issues since 2018, surpassing rumors [19,65].…”

Digitainability—Digital Competences Post-COVID-19 for a Sustainable Society

“…However, the digital divide exists in the differences in access and use (consumption and production) of the digital and is deeply linked to the cultural, economic and social conditions of individuals, as well as their gender and age [79,[106][107][108], which hinders sustainable development [21,104] in a post-COVID-19 context [103,109]. For example, the "COVID-19 Infodemic" with fake news focusing on COVID-19 [35,36,110] created situations of misinformation that science communication found difficult to clarify [111][112][113][114][115][116][117].…”

Memetics of Deception: Spreading Local Meme Hoaxes during COVID-19 1st Year

“…The term "fake news" first appeared in 2005, but it only really caught on from 2017 (57 articles) and grew in 2018 (215) and 2019 (224). Meanwhile between 2005-2017 the term was linked to "parody", "Jon Stewart" (presenter of The Daily Show) and "literacy", from 2018 onwards it was linked to political communication", "bias", "verification", "Twitter", "social networks", "populism" and also "Russia" [14]. All this refers only tentatively to the term fake news in a couple of years, after the rise of the term post-truth, which was coined between 2015 and 2016 [3], especially during and after the Brexit campaign and for electing Donald Trump in 2016 [2,6,26], and afterwards in the infodemic derived from the global health crisis [27][28][29].…”

“…In fact, it is clear that in practically all empirical studies such as ours, most fake news refuted both by trusted fact checkers and the media come from unprofessional sources, which are often unidentified and shared by unidentified electronic messaging and not the media. This means there is a need to collaborate in tracking, checking and rejecting fake reports both by means of artificial intelligence tools which automate and systemise the search and identification of patterns or signs of false report formats, such as those being developed for processing natural language [11][12][13][14][15] but also in photography or doctored videos [16,17].…”