Web Intelligence Journal in perspective: an analysis of its two decades trajectory

The evolution of a thematic area undergoes various changes of perspective and adopts new theoretical approaches that arise from the interactions of the community and a wide range of social needs. The advent of digital technologies, such as social networks, underlines this factor by spreading knowledge and forging links between different communities. Web intelligence is now on the verge of raising questions that broaden the understanding of how artificial intelligence impacts the Web of People, Data, and Things, among other factors. To the best of our knowledge, there is no study that has conducted a longitudinal analysis of the evolution of this community. Thus, we investigate in this paper how Web intelligence has evolved in the last twenty years by carrying out a literature review and bibliometric analysis. Concerning the impact of this research study, increasing attention is devoted to determining which are the most influential papers in the community by referring to citation networks and discovering the most popular and pressing topics through a co-citation analysis and the keywords co-occurrence. The results obtained can guide the direction of new research projects in the area and update the scope and places of interest found in current trends and the relevant journals.