Understanding the structure, characteristics, and future of collective intelligence using local and global bibliometric analyses

“Collective Intelligence” has been a popular area of research for more than a decade. We apply two different analytical approaches (local and global bibliometric analysis) to describe how this literature is organized and how it has evolved. A local approach focuses on the 3,138 articles indexed in the Scopus database where ‘collective intelligence’ is in the title, abstract, or keyword. A global approach reclassifies all of the Scopus documents into research communities using all (1.28 billion) citations in the database and proceeds to identify which research communities are populated by the 3,138 Collective Intelligence (CI) articles. These two approaches provide significantly different perspectives on how CI is structured, who the leaders of the field are, and how it is evolving. A synthesis of these two perspectives provides ideas for those who wish to contribute to the collective intelligence field. Our findings support the Kuhnian idea of research communities as a useful concept in bibliometric analysis.