Keywords:
metascience
scientometrics
methodology

  • Abstract

    Metascience—the study of science itself—has gained increasing visibility in the aftermath of the replication crisis, as questions of credibility, transparency, and reproducibility have reshaped the norms of knowledge production. Yet despite its rapid expansion, the field remains conceptually fragmented and methodologically unsettled. This study maps the evolution of metascience between 2000 and 2024 through a large-scale bibliometric analysis encompassing seven interrelated domains: conceptual foundations, scholarly infrastructure, the scientific community, research artiefacts, reference managers, plagiarism detection, and literature review methods. Across these domains, the analysis identifies recurrent thematic anchors around publication and model, indicating a dual structure that reflects both the communicative and computational dimensions of contemporary science. Biomedical and educational vocabularies appear pervasively across clusters, revealing disciplinary imbalances produced by keyword convergence within major bibliometric databases. Meanwhile, the growing presence of algorithmic and ethical terms—ranging from plagiarism detection and reference management to artificial intelligence—illustrates metascience’s transition toward a more reflexive, technologically mediated form of self-examination. Beyond these empirical findings, the study exposes a methodological paradox: because metascience operates through highly generic descriptors such as “research,” “article,” and “evaluation,” systematic literature reviews and keyword-based retrieval techniques tend to produce distorted landscapes that include conceptually unrelated studies. Addressing this limitation requires the adoption of hybrid methodologies, controlled vocabularies, and curated datasets that account for the layered, interdisciplinary, and self-referential nature of metascience. In doing so, this study not only maps the contours of research on research but also reflects on how the very infrastructures of inquiry shape science’s capacity to understand itself.

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How to cite

Putawa, R. A. (2026). Research on research on research: Mapping the reflexive structure of metascience (2000–2024). Multidisciplinary Science Journal, 8(8), 2026521. https://doi.org/10.31893/multiscience.2026521
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