Jul 2026· DISCOURSE: Indonesian Journal of Social Studies and Education· Vol 3, pp. 68-92· 0 citations· 14 references
TL;DR
The temporal mapping suggests that influencer marketing is increasingly evolving from a promotional strategy into a broader digitally mediated social influence phenomenon involving interactions among influencers, consumers, brands, platforms, algorithms, and emerging technologies.
Abstract
The rapid development of social media and the creator economy has positioned influencer marketing as an increasingly important phenomenon in contemporary digital society. However, the rapid expansion of research in this field has resulted in a fragmented body of knowledge, making it necessary to identify its intellectual structure and emerging research frontiers. This study aims to map the intellectual structure, thematic relationships, and temporal development of research on influencer marketing. A bibliometric analysis and science mapping approach was employed using publications indexed in Scopus from 2000 to 2026, with VOSviewer used to analyze keyword co-occurrence, thematic clusters, density, and temporal trends. The findings indicate that influencer marketing, social media, influencers, purchase intention, engagement, consumption behavior, and commerce constitute the central themes shaping the intellectual structure of the field. The analysis further reveals a thematic shift from conventional consumer-oriented research toward emerging issues involving virtual influencers, artificial intelligence, generative AI, creator economy, social commerce, green marketing, sustainable consumption, transparency, privacy, and kidfluencers. The temporal mapping suggests that influencer marketing is increasingly evolving from a promotional strategy into a broader digitally mediated social influence phenomenon involving interactions among influencers, consumers, brands, platforms, algorithms, and emerging technologies. From a social sciences perspective, these findings highlight the need to examine influencer marketing through broader theoretical lenses, including social influence, parasocial relationships, digital identity, platform society, digital labor, human–AI interaction, social norms, and digital governance. This study contributes by providing a comprehensive map of the evolution of influencer marketing and identifying future research directions at the intersection of marketing, technology, and digital social transformation.
Abstract* Background Social media marketing dynamics have been reshaped with the rise of micro-influencers, with the offering of community-driven and authentic brand engagement that goes beyond traditional celebrity endorsements and advertising. This study aims to systematically examine the micro-influencer research published between 2020 and 2025, focusing on identifying themes, research gaps, methodological characteristics, and providing future directions. Methods This paper focuses on providing a thorough systematic literature review (SLR) incorporating the PRISMA protocol on micro-influencers, while identifying interdependencies and relationships. 68 research papers were derived from the Scopus database, analysed through bibliometric and content analysis. Bibliometric analysis was conducted using a combination of VOSviewer and Biblioshiny packages. Results were analysed through thematic clusters, co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling analysis. Results The analysis depicts a steady growth in publications accelerated with digitalisation and post-COVID consumer shift that placed a commercial value on small-scale influencers. Research is fragmented across authenticity, trust, engagement, sponsorship disclosure, and niche-domains for micro-influencers. The literature is geographically skewed towards the West and high-income Asian countries. Less longitudinal, mixed-method, andneuroscientific evidence with strong methodological concentration across quantitative survey, and computational methods was present. Algorithmic visibility, emerging platform comparisons, influencer labour, and non-commercial uses of micro-influencers were underexplored themes. Five research areas were identified from clustering. Conclusion Despite the rapid expansions, micro-influencer literature remains theoretically fragmented and unevenly distributed. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of the literature on micro-influencers, synthesises these fragmented findings into an integrated cocneptual framework and provides implications and future research directions. Most studies focused on analysing a single platform with cross-sectional designs. This study highlights the need for thorough theoretical integration with methodological diversification, considering emerging platforms to better understand how micro influencers shape digital communication.
L. Wimalasena, D. Dissanayake· F1000Research· 0 citations
This study uses a hybrid methodology of bibliometric analysis and systematic review to critically review the existing research on corporate digital transformation (CDT) effects published between 2018 and 2025. Descriptive analysis shows that this research field was still in its infancy before 2022 and experienced an explosive growth period thereafter. China takes the lead in publication volume, while
Finance Research Letters
emerges as the most prolific journal and research results are predominantly concentrated in domains such as finance and economics. Keyword and thematic analysis indicate that “digital transformation” is the core keyword, and research themes have gradually expanded from basic dimensions like firm performance to diverse areas including ESG, supply chain management, and risk management. The evolution of CDT effects research proceeds along the lines of technological determinism, organizational adaptation, and social construction. This study advances a systematic understanding of the CDT effects by developing a bibliometric overview of relevant research and illustrating the field's conceptual framework and thematic interconnections. The findings offer empirical insights to guide managers in formulating differentiated digital strategies and assist policymakers in constructing supportive ecosystems for digital transformation.
Qun Hong, Yi-Fan Zhang, Li-Li Hao et al.· Journal of economic surveys...· 0 citations
As an integrated educational model that combines inquiry-based learning with travel experiences, study travel plays a significant role in fostering students’ social responsibility, innovative spirit, and practical abilities, and has attracted growing attention worldwide. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, this study conducts a systematic review of the literature published between 1950 and 2025. It identifies six major themes corresponding to the three stages of study travel. Through bibliometric analysis, the research delineates publication trends, core journal distributions, and keyword co-occurrence networks in the field. The findings indicate that experiential learning, constructivism, and transformative learning theory constitute the dominant theoretical foundations in current scholarship. Moreover, a notable “learning–travel imbalance” is observed, whereby educational processes and learning outcomes receive substantially more scholarly attention than travel attributes, industry logic, and managerial dimensions. This paper offers a systematic mapping of the knowledge terrain and theoretical architecture in international study travel research, clarifies existing gaps, and suggests directions for future interdisciplinary integration and for deeper synthesis of “learning” and “travel” in both research and practice.
This study examines the psychological foundations of virtual influencer research within the broader context of artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven personalization, advertising, marketing communication, and human–AI interaction. As AI-generated social actors become increasingly embedded in digitally mediated environments, research on virtual influencers has expanded rapidly across psychology, communication, marketing, and media studies. However, the field remains conceptually fragmented, limiting understanding of its dominant psychological themes, intellectual structure, and future research directions.
This study employed the SPAR-4-SLR protocol to conduct a systematic literature review of virtual influencer research. Articles were retrieved from four major databases and screened using predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria, resulting in a final sample of 116 peer-reviewed studies published between 2015 and 2025. Bibliometric techniques, including performance analysis and science mapping using VOSviewer, were applied to examine publication trends, collaboration patterns, influential contributors, and thematic structures within the field.
The findings indicate that virtual influencer research has expanded rapidly since 2021 and has evolved into an increasingly interdisciplinary field. China emerged as the leading contributor in terms of publication output, while analyses of publications, citations, and co-authorships revealed a fragmented intellectual structure, with influence distributed across multiple research teams. Keyword co-occurrence analysis identified seven thematic clusters, highlighting authenticity, trust, anthropomorphism, consumer engagement, artificial intelligence, and digital marketing as the dominant research themes.
This study integrates systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis to provide a comprehensive overview of the intellectual development of virtual influencer research. The findings indicate that the field is increasingly shaped by the convergence of consumer psychology, artificial intelligence, advertising, and marketing communication, with authenticity, trust, anthropomorphism, and consumer engagement emerging as its principal research themes. By synthesizing fragmented evidence, this study provides a structured roadmap for future research on human–AI interaction, digital identity, parasocial relationships, and virtual influencer marketing. The findings also contribute to advertising and marketing communication by clarifying the dominant research directions, identifying emerging knowledge gaps, and highlighting opportunities for future theoretical and empirical development.
D. Khalfallah· Frontiers in Communication· 0 citations
Since the end of the Cold War, Joseph S. Nye’s concept of soft power has become a central analytical framework for understanding national attraction and non-coercive influence in international relations. Despite the rapid expansion of both theoretical and empirical research, the field still lacks systematic bibliometric evidence concerning its knowledge structure, thematic evolution, and patterns of scholarly collaboration. To address this gap, this study constructs a comprehensive bibliometric map of global soft power research based on 2,772 English-language social science articles indexed in the Scopus database from 1991 to 2025. Using VOSviewer and RStudio (Biblioshiny), the analysis examines publication trends, citation structures, country collaboration networks, author co-citation relationships, keyword co-occurrence patterns, and thematic evolution pathways. The findings indicate that soft power research experienced steady growth after 2005, followed by a pronounced acceleration after 2015. While the United States, China, and the United Kingdom remain the principal research hubs, Australia emerges as an important cross-regional bridge, suggesting a shift toward a more multi-center structure of knowledge production. Keyword co-occurrence and thematic evolution further reveal a transition from early concept-oriented debates to a more diversified and policy-focused research agenda. In addition, soft power is increasingly conceptualized as an observable and comparable form of international influence, with growing attention to practical domains such as higher education cooperation, sports diplomacy, digital diplomacy, vaccine diplomacy, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Overall, this study systematically maps the intellectual structure and emerging frontiers of global soft power research, highlighting the rise of multipolar soft power and a shift toward policy-oriented and interdisciplinary inquiry, while providing a bibliometric foundation for developing measurable soft power assessment frameworks.
Na Wang, M. Ahmad· Multidisciplinary Reviews· 0 citations
Digital humanities has emerged as a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field at the intersection of humanities, information science, and computational scholarship. The study employs standard bibliometric indicators and visualization techniques to analyse author productivity over time, Lotka's law of scientific productivity, most relevant countries by corresponding author, most cited countries, key word co-occurrence network, thematic mapping of terms and documents in digital humanities to understand its intellectual landscape.Authorship analysis indicates a dominance of single-authored publications, although collaborative research is also becoming increasingly prominent. United States and China emerged as the most productive countries, while citation impact was comparatively stronger in countries such as the United States, Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands. Keyword co-occurrence network and thematic analyses show that digital humanities is organized around interconnected themes such as information systems, computational models, networks, algorithms, knowledge, behaviour, impact, and scholarly communication. The study helps in understanding the intellectual and knowledge structure of digital humanities and offers insights for researchers, educators, policymakers, and library and information science professionals for conducting future studies on thematic evolution, interdisciplinary integration, and global research collaboration in the field of digital humanities.
A. S· IP Indian Journal of Library...· 0 citations