XR Knowledge Mapping Review

Katerina Girginova, Matthew O'Donnell

Editors’ Note: This essay was amended in January 2025 due an oversight in the initial query criteria. The use of the term “XR” falsely included material from the biomedical sciences that were not about extended reality. See the revised, corrected query in footnote 4.

Knowledge mapping, also known as science mapping, is a process that allows us to visualize and analyze the core features of publications on a specific topic (Chen, 2017^[1]). This process reveals a number of important factors about a body of literature, including its intellectual and geographical structure. Knowledge mapping also allows us to ask and answer questions like, who are the key authors within the field of social science^[2] XR research? Or where is our knowledge geographically emanating from? Or who is funding this work and how democratized is the knowledge (i.e., what is its open access status)? Examined over time, knowledge mapping may also reveal paradigm shifts within a research field.

Whereas the sections on XR theory, methodology, language, and technologies that follow draw from 344 peer-reviewed articles published within three specific journals dedicated to XR research^[3], this section takes a more expansive approach. In order to map out all of the peer-reviewed, social science publications in English during 2022 and to compare them to XR research efforts across disciplines, this section draws from two wider bodies of work:

• 1,457 articles, which make up all of the accessible, peer-reviewed social science publications in English during 2022.
• 8,219 articles, which include the 1,457 articles from social science publications, and all accessible, peer-reviewed articles from other disciplines that have published research in English related to XR in 2022.

For more details about the selection criteria and specific methodology applied for this review please refer to the appendix.^[4] The findings from the knowledge mapping review first situate social science XR research contextually and historically, and then delve into questions of authorship, affiliation, and funding.

Figure 1 below shows that social sciences made up a relatively small percent (~10%) of the overall pool of 8,219 XR-related articles in 2022. As might be expected, computer science was the output leader followed by engineering and medicine, which together accounted for about 55% of the total publication output. There are several reasons for this imbalance, including the fact that the latter are all applied fields, not only at the forefront of using XR technologies, but also actively developing them.

Nonetheless, there has been an increase in interest in XR in the social sciences, as evidenced by the upsurge in publications within the last decade (See Figure 2). This momentum coincides with what is often called the second wave of XR; that is, the phase during which XR tools became commercially available due to technological advances and lowered costs. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the majority of the articles in both, the social sciences set, and the overall 2022 XR publication set, set were specifically about VR experiences and technologies.

Notably, a high percent of the 1,457 social sciences articles published in 2022 were from the field of education. Furthermore, four out of the five most prolific authors (Huang, H., Mantri, A., Cheng K-H., and Makransky, G., in order of number of articles published) in the social sciences were writing about education-related topics. Upon closer review, many of these articles were inspired by the recent educational upheavals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and examine facets of distance learning in an often-implicit precaution to similar events in the future. In fact, many of the educational or professional training advances in XR research are framed as much within the hype of democratized online learning as they are in preparation for further global doomsday mitigation.

Geographies of Knowledge Production

Out of the 8,219 XR articles published in 2022, China was the leading intellectual source (22%), with the US in second place (20%). Within the scope of social sciences XR articles these two positions were reversed, but the output gap was significantly bigger: China accounted for 13% whereas the US for 22% of publications. Figure 3 below shows the most social science research-prolific countries globally.

Authors and Affiliations

Over 90% of all social science XR articles were co-authored. Further, the most prolific institutions in terms of XR social science output all house multiple XR labs or departments conducting related research. The most prolific institutions were: National Taiwan Normal University, University of Florida, University of Toronto, University of Singapore, Monash University, and National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. This is a promising indication of institutional support for an emergent, global field of research. It is also a reminder of the cross-disciplinary nature of XR research, and the knowledge-production benefits of academic institutions with multiple XR labs or experts from different disciplines. Notably, as the findings suggest, it is still possible for smaller institutions and individual XR researchers to attain similar synergies through external collaborations.

On a broader scale, from the total 8,219 publications across all disciplines in 2022, the top 10 academic affiliations in XR knowledge production were all based in France, China, UK, Canada and Australia. The most prolific affiliation of output is CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Sceintifique), which is a French state research organization and the largest fundamental science agency in Europe, with a production of just over 1% of all publications. While no single organizational affiliation dominates the research output – the most prolific one accounts for just over 1% of works – the top three organizations are all national-level bodies, which demonstrates the present importance of XR technologies. For comparison, every one of the top ten social-science publishing institutions was university. Similarly, no single institution dominated the social sciences research in 2022, with the top institution, National Taiwan Normal University, accounting for just 1% of the overall publications.

Keywords

The keywords reveal that the overarching themes of education and learning dominated the XR social science agenda in 2022. In addition, COVID-19 and terminology from cognitive psychology suggests two further contexts driving work.

Sources

Figure 5 below shows the ten most actively publishing journals for XR social science research in 2022. In addition, the three core journals dedicated to XR research, which are the main subject of analysis of the remainder of the sections of this publication, are listed at the top of Figure 5 in blue.

Figure 5: Articles per Journal

The leading journals by number of XR publications cluster around education, human-computer interaction, and environmental issues. Education is the leading context of social science research; however, sustainability and the environment make a notable appearance in 2022.

Funding and Access

Almost half (49% or 725 papers) of the articles designated as XR social science research were backed by some form of funding. The main funding bodies were national-level agencies, such as numerous Ministries of Education and the European Commission. As figure 6 shows, four of the five top funding sources were based in Asia (specifically Taiwan, China, and Korea). This suggests that XR is a national research priority field with numerous practical applications. It is also worth noting that hardware manufacturers like HTC, Meta, and Pico are mostly located within these top three countries.

Figure 6: Funding Sources of Social Science Research in 2022

While XR education and training-related research was common across all grant-funded work, some country-specific differences in additional priority contexts did emerge. Grant-funded research emanating from China and Taiwan focused on developing manufacturing, building, and tourism-related XR research. Work funded in the US had a mental-health focus, and grants from Taiwan favored work advancing technical developments and ways to stimulate creativity.

Half of the articles were classified as open access, which leaves room for improvement in the democratization of knowledge; specifically, if the work is designated of national-level importance.

1. Chen, C. (2017). Science mapping: a systematic review of the literature. Journal of data and information science, 2(2), 1-40. https://doi.org/10.1515/jdis-2017-0006 ↑

2. Our working definition of social science research refers to work that explores human society and social relationships. This includes fields such as sociology, psychology, and communication studies amongst others. However, it is worth noting that the exact selection criteria and algorithms the Scopus database used to determine what articles classify as social science are not made explicit and they do certainly affect the data obtained, even if in minimal ways. ↑

3. The 344 articles represent all of the research publications in 2022 from the following three journals, which are specifically dedicated to XR studies: Frontiers in Virtual Reality and Virtual Reality and Presence: Virtual and Augmented Reality. ↑

4. The following string query was updated and used in Scopus on January 23rd, 2025, to obtain the results:

   TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "XR" OR "VR" OR "mixed reality" OR "virtual reality" OR "extended reality" OR "augmented reality" ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( PUBSTAGE , "final" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , "ar" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( PUBYEAR , 2022 ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( LANGUAGE , "English" ) ) AND ( EXCLUDE ( SUBJAREA , "BIOC" ) OR EXCLUDE ( SUBJAREA , "IMMU" ) OR EXCLUDE ( SUBJAREA , "PHAR" ) OR EXCLUDE ( SUBJAREA , "CHEM" ) ) ↑

5. The category labeled ‘Other’ consisted of a range of smaller publication fields like Earth Sciences. In addition, some of these categories are not mutually exclusive but Scopus seems to have categorized the articles into disciplines based on the highest relevancy. ↑

6. Keywords are based on the top 20 author-identified keywords across the 1,457 social science articles. ↑