# Bibliometric Analysis of Social Robotics Research: Identifying Research Trends and Knowledgebase
## 1 Introduction  
Robotic technologies are becoming ubiquitous. Robots are expanding beyond the structured and repetitive environments of factories to take positions in the service sector, not only for professional, but also for personal and domestic use. However, these new workplaces present challenges. Not only are they unstructured environments, but the tasks at hand are more complex with requirements varying constantly. Even more importantly, there is a frequent interaction with users in this setting. Robots are now situated in a social context, where users unconsciously project norms that are intrinsically human to the machines [1]. Therefore, robotic technologies are expected to fit certain social norms in order to facilitate interaction. Social robotics as a field of research appears to bring a better understanding of this complexity.  
Social robotics is defined as \"the study of robots that interact and communicate among themselves, with humans, and with the environment, within the social and cultural structure attached to their roles\" [2]. Journals and conferences usually attempt to confine the field by focusing on topics like affective and cognitive science for socially-interactive robots, biomechatronics, intelligent control and artificial intelligence for social robotics, social attention, tracking and gaze, and so on [2,3]. This field also overlaps with other subfields of robotics, computer science and engineering. Therefore, social robotics must be understood in the context of the greater field of robotics. However, while there is plenty of literature tackling the definition and characteristics of social robots [4, 5, 6, 7, 8], no research has tried to comprehend social robotics as a field.  
The objective of this article is to study the structure of social robotics research. We intend to answer the following questions: What is the position of social robotics in the general landscape ofrobotics? What are the main topics of research? What are its research trends and knowledgebase. When research topics are young, it is expected that the community of researchers involved has a good understanding of the core research trends. However, as the topic grows, having a complete overview becomes challenging. Computer-based approaches are helpful to sort such difficulties. They can bring a comprehensive and unbiased picture regardless of the size of the field [9]. For that purpose, we use bibliometrics, which is the application of computer-based techniques for the analysis of publication data, in this case academic articles published in journals or conference proceedings.  
Bibliometrics has become an important tool to grasp the entire perspective of a research domain, especially when the amount of publication is large and its delimitation is complex. By exploring several features of academic articles, we can expose the pillars of knowledge by which a research field is supported [10]. Additionally, the taxonomy of a field can be revealed by creating maps of science, or academic landscapes. Various techniques have been used to map a large corpus of literature, such as maps of all scientific knowledge [11] or mapping specific ones like nanobiotechnology [12].  
Bibliometric techniques have been previously applied to the field of robotics. An overview of the field has been conducted to discover the strengths and weaknesses of Japanese robotics [13], [PERSON] et al. analyzed patents and publications on care-robotics [14], and [PERSON] et al. [15] used academic landscapes to establish connections between robotics and gerontology. Publications in the field have also been linked to social issues detected in news articles [16]. By using similar methodologies, we explore the case of social robotics.