Virtual Research Environments, Science Gateways and Virtual Laboratories are systems aiming at serving the needs of their designated communities of practice by providing them with a working environment for performing their tasks. These systems have been proposed and exploited in diverse application domains and scopes ranging from education to simulation, collaboration, and open science. This paper analyses the literature published from 2010 to start characterising this manifold family of systems. In particular, the study identified and analysed a corpus of 1167 research papers to highlight their distribution over time, the most frequent publication venues and the characterising topics.