An examination of immersive journalism by bibliometric analysis from 1999 to 2023

Immersive journalism is an innovative storytelling approach that aims to enable the audience to experience the event or situation in the news using virtual reality, unlike traditional news narration. In this study, the literature related to the subject was searched using the keywords Immersive Journalism, 360-Degree Video, Narrative journalism, Newsgame, VR Storytelling through the Web of Science database and a data set was created from 955 publications between 1999 and 2023. No filter was applied to the studies in the data set of the study and articles, books, and early access publications as well as book chapters, editorial materials or conference proceedings in the Web of Science database were included in the study. Bibliometric analysis techniques were applied to the obtained data set and the collaboration status and citation maps of authors and institutions were revealed together with various parameters including authors, institutions, keywords used, number of citations and distribution of publications according to countries. As a result of the analyses, while the number of studies related to the subject has increased since 2017, the highest number of studies was conducted in 2021. The most articles on the subject of the study are in the "Communication" category. While the majority of academic studies on the subject were carried out in the United States, studies originating from this country were cited the most. While "Virtual Reality" is the most commonly used word in the studies on the subject, "IEEE Access" stands out as the journal with the most publications on the subject. On the other hand, the study revealed important authors, studies and themes in the literature on immersive journalism, emphasised the interactions between authors and disciplines, and provided a road map for future research. The study has limitations in terms of the publication languages of some of the studies in the dataset, the time period of the dataset and the singularity of the preferred database.