A Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis of Knowledge Mapping in Digital Economy Research, 1992–2022

Abstract

Digital economy is a vital driving force for countries to promote economic recovery, rebuild competitive advantages and enhance governance capacity. Extensive research has been conducted in this field. In this paper, the text analysis tool of Bicomb2.04 and the knowledge graph visualization tool of CiteSpace are applied to analyze the digital economy research from 1992 to 2022, and a total of 7874 articles retrieved from the SSCI and SCI of the WOS core database are collected as the research data. The analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the research status of the digital economy, including the distribution of literature, research institutions and regions, research funds and publications, research authors, and cooperation networks. The core progress and frontier of international research are further analyzed according to the evolution of hot keywords, core system clustering, and the hot emergent words frontier. The results show that (1) the academic circle has a good overall research trend on the digital economy, which can be divided into three steadily rising research stages. The researchers take digital innovation as the core and extend it to the application of digital innovation, which has made groundbreaking theoretical contributions, but has not yet formed a team with field influence. (2) The evolution of hot keywords can be divided into four stages. Through hot clustering analysis, a basic theoretical system is constructed with digital technology and innovation as the core and digital governance, digital application, and digital path as the means. (3) The analysis of frontier areas also identified the digital platform economy, big data technology innovation, digital economy statistics, and the gig economy as potential research directions for the future. This study provides a guide for researchers to promote further research on the digital economy and is of great significance for promoting digital development level and constructing global digital ecosystem.