More Than an Information Source: A Bibliometric Review of Evidential Studies (1992–2021)

As a linguistic phenomenon with information sources as its core semantic content, evidentiality has received much academic attention. Based on data from Web of Science (WOS) from 1992 to 2021, this study performed a bibliometric analysis to track the changes and characteristics of evidential studies, focusing on the number of published papers, prolific authors, journals and institutions, and highly cited literature. Our findings indicated that (1) the last 40 years have seen a significant increase in interest in evidential studies; (2) prolific authors exhibit strong connections with high-yield institutions; (3) the United States and Spain are the top two most influential contributors in evidential studies; and (4) research has mostly centred on theoretical, typological, semantic, and pragmatic studies of evidentiality. Finally, this study traced the changes in topics over the past 30 years and proposed future directions for evidential studies. This study suggested that future studies should investigate evidentiality in various languages to establish a more inclusive typology and further enrich the semantics of evidentiality as well as focus on more diversified genres and broader social contexts.