A bibliometric analysis of the International Journal of Advances in Soft Computing and its Applications: Research influence and Contributions

Abstract

The International Journal of Advances in Soft Computing and its Applications (IJASCA) is a rapidly growing academic journal published by Al-Zaythoonah University of Jordan (ZUJ). IJASCA publishes original contributions on soft computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data and other current science and technological trends. This study uses different bibliometric analysis tools to analyze the IJASCA published research papers between 2009 and 2021. The analysis includes annual publication growth, citation patterns, most prolific authors, institutions and countries, co-citation and co-occurrence networks analysis. A total of 317 published papers have been studied. The results show that IJASCA has grown in research contributions from 12 papers in 2009 to 40 papers in 2021, and citations have grown drastically to 2253. Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor, is the institution that contributed the most to IJASCA publications with 109 papers. Malaysia is the country that was cited the most with 794 citations. Thematic analysis shows that the most important author keywords are soft computing, optimization, machine learning, big data and cloud computing. Overall, the findings are beneficial to the IJASCA editorial board. Its retrospective review will most likely encourage journal readers and assist the editorial team in developing research strategies that will allow research scientists to contribute high-quality research papers to the IJASCA. Keywords: IJASCA, Bibliometric analysis, co-citation analysis, co-occurrence analysis, thematic analysis, Scopus