Informetric Analysis of Researches on Legal Issues Related to Artificial Intelligence

The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has exerted a huge impact on all aspects of society including the legal field. Considerable research has been conducted on the legal issues related to artificial intelligence. Herein, taking 621 papers indexed by Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science as the object, the basic status of research on legal issues related to artificial intelligence was analyzed using the quantitative and visual analysis method. In terms of the research field, the results showed that the research on legal issues related to artificial intelligence shows interdisciplinary characteristics, that is, the legal issues related to artificial intelligence not only attract scholars in the legal field, but also those in computer science, engineering, social sciences, library and information science, business economics and other fields. In terms of keyword cooccurrence and cluster analysis, it was found that the legal issues related to artificial intelligence mentioned in these papers can be mainly divided into the following three categories: the first is the positive impact of artificial intelligence on practice of law, involving legal services, law enforcement, legal analysis (e.g., legal reasoning, legal argumentation), etc.; the second is the practical challenges possibly arising from artificial intelligence, including the determination of criminal responsibility, the governance of discrimination or bias risks, and the protection of copyright, privacy, and data rights; and the third is the regulatory solutions for artificial intelligence mainly focusing on ethical regulation, legislative regulation, technical regulation.