  Critical analysis of the state of the art is a necessary task when
identifying new research lines worthwhile to pursue. To such an end, all the
available work related to the field of interest must be taken into account. The
key point is how to organize, analyze, and make sense of the huge amount of
scientific literature available today on any topic. To tackle this problem, we
present here a bibliometric approach to Systematic Mapping Studies (SMS). Thus,
a modify SMS protocol is used relying on the scientific references metadata to
extract, process and interpret the wealth of information contained in nowadays
research literature. As a test case, the procedure is applied to determine the
current state and perspectives of community detection in complex networks. Our
results show that community detection is a still active, far from exhausted, in
development, field. In addition, we find that, by far, the most exploited
methods are those related to determining hierarchical community structures. On
the other hand, the results show that fuzzy clustering techniques, despite
their interest, are underdeveloped as well as the adaptation of existing
algorithms to parallel or, more specifically, distributed, computational
systems.
