Gamification and scholarly ethical perspectives on industries, a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Gamification applications are rapidly growing within industries, firms, and institutions as well as in consumer populations since the past decade. While this phenomenon is still in the early stages of development and diffusion, critics are voicing concerns over ethical and social responsibility issues underlying the intent and effects of questionable gamification uses with consumers, students, and employees. Results from this exploratory bibliometric analysis during this nascent period identifies occurrences of scholarly articles that used ethics perspectives related to gamification in particular industries. Our findings raise the following questions regarding ethics research and articles across industries, “Which industries have shown the most and least scholarly, academic publications using ethical perspectives? Is ethics research trending upward with the growth of gamification applications or not? Why, and should it?”