Research trends in the field of natural language processing : A scientometric study based on global publications during 2001-2020

The study provides a quantitative and qualitative description of global research in "Natural Language Processing" ( NLP) using bibliometric methods. The analysis is based on publications data sourced from Scopus database for the period 2001-2020. The purpose of the study is to understand the status of NLP research at the global, national, institutional, and author level. The study highlights the productivity and performance of NLP research on a series of metrics as well as provides a visual view of collaborative network relationship between authors, research institutions, and leading countries using standard software tools. In addition, the study identified the leading players in NLP research such as key countries, institutions, authors, and areas of research. According to the study, the USA leads in global publications output as well as it leads in terms of relative citation index.