Mapping the Landscape of Metadata Research in the Era of Open Science: A Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis of Last Three Decades (1996–2025)

Over the last thirty years, metadata has emerged as a strong component of digital scholarship, interoperability, and research data management. The paper is based on extensive bibliometric study of metadata research over a period of 30 years (1996–2025), using 403 publications that are included in the Web of Science. The study explores publication growth, intellectual structure, influential sources, and patterns of global collaboration using descriptive indicators, performance metrics, and science mapping techniques, such as coauthorship, key word co-occurrence, Bradfords Law, and three field plots using Bibliometrix R and VOSviewer. Findings indicate that the growth rate remained constant at 8.45%, which indicates the persistent scholarly interest and maturity of metadata as a research field. A wide and growing thematic range is indicated by the high citation average (109.3 citations per document) and the size of author keywords. The kernel of research output and scholarly impact is made up of a limited number of core journals: Library Resources and Technical Services, Electronic Library, Journal of Documentation and Scientific Data. The visualization of key words in the form of keyword clustering and VOSviewer identify four large thematic categories that include metadata standards and quality, semantic representation and ontologies, digital libraries and classification, and interoperability frameworks. In general, the study provides an intellectual history and interdisciplinary growth of metadata research, and can be useful to researchers, librarians, and policy makers who aim to build more interoperable, machine actionable, and sustainable metadata ecosystems.