Conceptualizing Research Trends of the Digital Economy (1998 – 2024) Evidence from Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The existence of the digital economy brings novelty to global economic activities, through technological transformation
that continues to grow rapidly from year to year. This research focuses on conceptualizing the development trend of
digital economy research publications from 1998 – 2024 by looking at publication trends, annual publication growth
rates, recent publications, most relevant sources, and country contributions to publications. In addition, this study also
aims to provide information on the relevance of keywords needed in digital economy research in the future. This research
took the Scopus database of 1,177 documents and used bibliometric analysis with a descriptive approach. The
researchers also used R Studio tools to obtain key information and VOSviewer to conduct a thorough analysis. The
results of the analysis show that the growth of literature has increased significantly since 2016 and shows a positive
trend. Recent publications on the digital economy are dominated by articles written by Wang Y. Keyword analysis
shows that the focus of digital economy research is interrelated with 4 main clusters, namely; innovation, economic
growth, digital technology, and China as a country that dominates research contributions on the topic of digital
economy. The data visualization results also present how the focus of research trends over the past 5 years. With the
focus of research in 2020 – 2022, namely on innovation, digital economy, economic growth and things that lead to
digitalization. Post-pandemic, the focus of research has shifted slightly to addressing problems caused by environmental
damage. With a research focus on digitalization and green innovation.