Research Article
BibTex RIS Cite

Global Trends and Collaboration Dynamics in Large Language Model Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Year 2025, Volume: 11 Issue: 2, 291 - 303, 31.08.2025

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have spearheaded a significant transformation in artificial intelligence, rapidly becoming a focal point of scientific research. This study aims to comprehensively analyze the intellectual structure and temporal evolution of scientific publications on LLMs using bibliometric methods. The research data comprises 10,321 articles that met the specified criteria, retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database using the search term "large language model". Performance analysis and science mapping techniques were applied using VOSviewer software for the data analysis and visualization. Within this scope, co-authorship, co-citation, and keyword co-occurrence analyses were conducted to identify the key actors, collaboration networks, intellectual foundations, and primary research topics in the field. The analysis reveals that the field has shown exponential growth since 2023, is shaped by the leadership of the USA and China, and is rapidly expanding beyond its theoretical core into applied areas like medicine and education

References

  • [1] H. Naveed, A. U. Khan, S. Qiu, M. Saqib, S. Anwar, M. Usman, ... and A. Mian, "A comprehensive overview of large language models," ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 1-72, Oct. 2025. doi: 10.1145/3744746
  • [2] W. X. Zhao, K. Zhou, J. Li, T. Tang, X. Wang, Y. Hou, ... and J.-R. Wen, "A survey of large language models," arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.18223, 2023. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2303.18223
  • [3] S. Han, M. Wang, J. Zhang, D. Li, and J. Duan, "A review of large language models: Fundamental architectures, key technological evolutions, interdisciplinary technologies integration, optimization and compression techniques, applications, and challenges," Electronics, vol. 13, no. 24, p. 5040, Dec. 2024. doi: 10.3390/electronics13245040
  • [4] L. Wu, Z. Zheng, Z. Qiu, H. Wang, H. Gu, T. Shen, ... and E. Chen, "A survey on large language models for recommendation," World Wide Web, vol. 27, no. 5, Aug. 2024. doi: 10.1007/s11280-024-01291-2
  • [5] A. Vaswani, N. Shazeer, N. Parmar, J. Uszkoreit, L. Jones, A. N. Gomez, ... and I. Polosukhin, "Attention is all you need," in Proc. of the 31st Int. Conf. on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2017), Dec. 4–9, 2017, Long Beach, CA, USA. Red Hook, NY: Curran Associates Inc., 2017, pp. 6000–6010
  • [6] J. Devlin, M.-W. Chang, K. Lee, and K. Toutanova, "BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding," arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805, 2018. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.1810.04805
  • [7] T. Brown, B. Mann, N. Ryder, M. Subbiah, J. D. Kaplan, P. Dhariwal, ... and D. Amodei, "Language models are few-shot learners," in Proc. of NeurIPS 2020, Dec. 6–12, 2020, Virtual Conference. Red Hook, NY: Curran Associates Inc., 2020, pp. 1877–1901.
  • [8] G. Gencer and K. Gencer, "Large language models in healthcare: A bibliometric analysis and examination of research trends," Journal of Multidisciplinary Healthcare, vol. 18, pp. 223-238, Jan. 2025. doi: 10.2147/JMDH.S502351
  • [9] A. D. Damayanti, H. Gani, Z. Feng, H. Gani, S. Zuhriyah, N. Nurani, ... and N. I. Wardani, "Bibliometric and content analysis of large language models research in software engineering: The potential and limitation in software engineering," International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA), vol. 16, no. 4, 2025. doi: 10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160436
  • [10] M. Oliński, K. Krukowski, and K. Sieciński, "Bibliometric overview of ChatGPT: New perspectives in social sciences," Publications, vol. 12, no. 1, 2024. doi: 10.3390/publications12010009
  • [11] C. Ziems, W. Held, O. Shaikh, J. Chen, Z. Zhang, and D. Yang, "Can large language models transform computational social science?" arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.03514, 2024. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2305.03514
  • [12] L. Fan, L. Li, Z. Ma, S. Lee, H. Yu, and L. Hemphill, "A bibliometric review of large language models research from 2017 to 2023," ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 1-25, Oct. 2024. doi: 10.1145/3664930
  • [13] Y. K. Dwivedi, N. Kshetri, L. Hughes, E. L. Slade, A. Jeyaraj, A. K. Kar, ... and R. Wright, "Opinion paper: 'So what if ChatGPT wrote it?' Multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges and implications of generative conversational AI for research, practice and policy," International Journal of Information Management, vol. 71, Art 102642, 2023. doi: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2023.102642
  • [14] R. Bommasani, D. A. Hudson, E. Adeli, R. Altman, S. Arora, S. von Arx, ... and P. Liang, "On the opportunities and risks of foundation models," arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.07258, 2021. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2108.07258
  • [15] M. Koo, "ChatGPT research: A bibliometric analysis based on the Web of Science from 2023 to June 2024," Knowledge, vol. 5, no. 1, 2025. doi: 10.3390/knowledge5010004
  • [16] I. F. S. Antunes and J. M. C. Veríssimo, "A bibliometric review and content analysis of research trends in sensory marketing," Cogent Business & Management, vol. 11, no. 1, 2024. doi: 10.1080/23311975.2024.2338879
  • [17] N. Donthu, S. Kumar, D. Mukherjee, N. Pandey, and W. M. Lim, "How to conduct a bibliometric analysis: An overview and guidelines," Journal of Business Research, vol. 133, pp. 285-296, 2021. doi: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.04.070
  • [18] I. Passas, "Bibliometric analysis: The main steps," Encyclopedia, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 1014-1025, 2024. doi: 10.3390/encyclopedia4020065
  • [19] J. W. Ayers, A. Poliak, M. Dredze, ... and others, "Comparing physician and artificial intelligence chatbot responses to patient questions posted to a public social media forum," JAMA Internal Medicine, vol. 183, no. 6, pp. 589-596, 2023. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.1838
  • [20] J. Liu, C. Wang, Z. Liu, M. Gao, Y. Xu, J. Chen, ... and Y. Cheng, "A bibliometric analysis of generative AI in education: Current status and development," Asia Pacific Journal of Education, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 156-175, 2024. doi: 10.1080/02188791.2024.2305170
  • [21] M. R. Zheltukhina, O. V. Sergeeva, A. R. Masalimova, R. L. Budkevich, N. N. Kosarenko, ... and G. V. Nesterov, "A bibliometric analysis of publications on ChatGPT in education: Research patterns and topics," Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2024. doi: 10.30935/ojcmt/14103
  • [22] B. Ersöz, Ş. Sağıroğlu, and H. İ. Bülbül, "Generative artificial intelligence opportunities and threats: Bibliometric analysis," in Proc. 9th Int. Conf. on Computer Science and Engineering (UBMK), Antalya, Türkiye, 2024, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1109/UBMK63289.2024.10773519
  • [23] Y. Chang, X. Wang, J. Wang, Y. Wu, L. Yang, K. Zhu, ... and X. Xie, "A survey on evaluation of large language models," ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 1-45, Jun. 2024. doi: 10.1145/3641289
  • [24] A. Martín-Martín, E. Orduna-Malea, M. Thelwall, and E. D. López-Cózar, "Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: A systematic comparison of citations in 252 subject categories," Journal of Informetrics, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 1160-1177, 2018. doi: 10.1016/j.joi.2018.09.002
  • [25] N. J. van Eck and L. Waltman, "Software survey: VOSviewer, a computer program for bibliometric mapping," Scientometrics, vol. 84, pp. 523-538, 2010. doi: 10.1007/s11192-009-0146-3
  • [26] A. Kirby, "Exploratory bibliometrics: Using VOSviewer as a preliminary research tool," Publications, vol. 11, no. 1, 2023. doi: 10.3390/publications11010010
There are 26 citations in total.

Details

Primary Language English
Subjects Computer Software
Journal Section Research Articles
Authors

Mevlüt Uysal 0000-0002-6934-4421

Publication Date August 31, 2025
Submission Date June 30, 2025
Acceptance Date August 26, 2025
Published in Issue Year 2025 Volume: 11 Issue: 2

Cite

IEEE M. Uysal, “Global Trends and Collaboration Dynamics in Large Language Model Research: A Bibliometric Analysis”, GJES, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 291–303, 2025.

GJES is indexed and archived by:

3311333114331153311633117

Gazi Journal of Engineering Sciences (GJES) publishes open access articles under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY) 1366_2000-copia-2.jpg