Unveiling the Landscape of Onomastics from 1972 to 2022

Over the past five decades, onomastics has seen remarkable growth with fruitful publications and interdisciplinary collaborations. Despite the abundance of literature, a panoramic view of contribution networks and the evolutionary trajectory of this field has been lacking. To address this issue, this study presents a statistical assessment complemented by visualization clustering, rendering data from 768 journal articles and 28,357 references, to unfold impactful journals, influential scholars, foundational knowledge, and evolving frontiers. The outcomes of this research showcase the distribution of subtopics within each name category, depicting noteworthy contributors, focal trends, and cutting-edge subjects in the area. New themes that illuminate orientations include online naming, multi-identity construction, language processing, corpus-assisted approaches, and neural-cognitive experiments. Further data-driven exploration of name-related themes is foreseen to yield valuable insights. Through this comprehensive assessment, this study elucidates the role of names as manifestations of human identity, social emotions, aesthetic ingenuity, and strategic communicative paradigms. The findings are poised to facilitate the discernment of human quality, societal stratification, interpretative nuances, and relationships underlying social issues. Additionally, this research exemplifies the efficacy of bibliometric analysis and proposes strategies to mitigate potential constraints, disclosing how quantitative data from onomastics can be applied in the digital era and beyond.