Informatics 2022, 9, 60. https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics9030060 www.mdpi.com/journal/informatics Article A Scientometric Study of the Stylometric Research Field Panagiotis D. Michailidis Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia, 54636 Thessaloniki, Greece; pmichailidis@uom.edu.gr Abstract: Stylometry has gained great popularity in digital humanities and social sciences. Many works on stylometry have recently been reported. However, there is a research gap regarding re- view studies in this field from a bibliometric and evolutionary perspective. Therefore, in this paper, a bibliometric analysis of publications from the Scopus database in the stylometric research field was proposed. Then, research articles published between 1968 and 2021 were collected and ana- lyzed using the Bibliometrix R package for bibliometric analysis via the Biblioshiny web interface. Empirical results were also presented in terms of the performance analysis and the science mapping analysis. From these results, it is concluded that there has been a strong growth in stylometry re- search in recent years, while the USA, Poland, and the UK are the most productive countries, and this is due to many strong research partnerships. It was also concluded that the research topics of most articles, based on author keywords, focused on two broad thematic categories: (1) the main tasks in stylometry and (2) methodological approaches (statistics and machine learning methods). Keywords: bibliometric analysis; stylometry; biblioshiny; Scopus 1. Introduction Stylometry is a research area which applies quantitative methods in order to study the linguistic or writing style of a text. A basic research problem of stylometry is to attrib- ute authorship to anonymous documents based on stylistic features, which is known as the authorship attribution problem. One of the first efforts to solve this problem was that of Mendenhall, who used the frequency distribution of words of various lengths to iden- tify the true author of Shakespeare plays [1]. In the digital age, stylometry has academic, literary, and social science applications ranging from plagiarism detection and visual arts to social media forensics [1]. A recent and systematic review of stylometry research was reported [1]. This study provides an overview of the statistical methods used for the three main tasks in stylome- try, including authorship attribution, authorship verification, and authorship profiling. Authorship attribution seeks a true author, authorship verification aims to determine whether documents were written by the same author, and authorship profiling seeks the demographic profile of an author (such as age or gender) [1]. Stylometry is a field which is continually evolving, and a review study in this field from a bibliometric and evolu- tionary perspective is absent. Inspired by this fact, the main goal of this paper is to provide an insightful bibliometric analysis of the research articles focused on the stylometry field. Bibliometric analysis involves the application of quantitative methods to explore and analyze a large volume of research articles, compared to a systematic review, which refers to a review of a small number of articles. In recent years, bibliometric analysis has at- tracted interest from many researchers for a variety of reasons, such as the emergence of digital technologies or bibliometric software such as VOSviewer, CiteSpace, Biblioshiny, and academic databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar [2–4]. The bibliometric methods can be categorized in two classes: performance analysis and science mapping analysis. Performance analysis refers to the indicators of the research output of Citation: Michailidis, P.D. A Scientometric Study of the Stylometric Research Field. Informatics 2022, 9, 60. https://doi.org/10.3390/ informatics9030060 Academic Editor: Dmitry Zinoviev Received: 30 June 2022 Accepted: 15 August 2022 Published: 18 August 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neu- tral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Li- censee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and con- ditions of the Creative Commons At- tribution (CC BY) license (https://cre- ativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).