Investigating the status of scientific products and the word co-occurrence in the field of digital diplomacy based on Web of Science

The present study used the scientometric approach to investigate the status of scientific products in the field of digital diplomacy. This study was conducted by considering 118 published documents from the beginning to the end of 2020 that were indexed in the Web of Science database. HistCite and Excel software was used for the analysis and VosViewer software was used to draw the collaboration and word co-occurrence network. Findings showed that publications in this field have significantly grown in recent years. The United States with 31 documents, the United Kingdom (28 documents), and Russia (10 documents) were the most productive countries in this field. The University of Oxford was the most productive university in this field (12 documents). The Hague Journal of Diplomacy also published the largest share of papers in this field (15 articles). In general, 11 different subject clusters were found in the word co-occurrence network of this field, which these clusters dealt with issues such as foreign policy, social networks, technology, cyber diplomacy, crisis, and so on. Totally, the results of the present study indicate that the field of digital diplomacy is an emerging field that has received much attention in recent years. It seems the growth of scientific production in this field coincides with the increase of media and social networks because social networks are introduced as the main tools in this field.