Emerging trends in digital transformation: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Purpose

Ubiquitous digital technologies are driving organisations to embrace non-traditional digitally transformed business models incessantly. Heterogeneous literature contributions have resulted in a spur in the research related to business transformation driven by digital technologies in recent years; consequently, the research under the digital transformation (DT), even though becoming a hotspot, remains very fragmented. The authors endeavour to holistically present the literature's intellectual structure under DT as a concept, its evolving journey and the emerging research streams in the business and management domains using the techniques of bibliometric analysis.

Design/methodology/approach

By performing bibliometric analysis on 234 research articles published over the last 20 years in the DT domain, retrieved from Thompson Reuters Web of Science ^TM, this study culls out thorough insights from the citation, co-citation and keyword analysis. Further emerging research streams were evaluated using VOSviewer software.

Findings

The study depicts an overall incremental trend of year-on-year publications, authors' performance, publication journals, associated institutions and research driving countries, along with key insights from co-citation network analysis. Furthermore, the study evaluates four research areas – organisational impacts, applied applications and insights, operational processes and social aspects, comprising eighteen research streams that comprehensively cover-up research under the DT domain.

Research limitations/implications

The study contributes to the literature of DT by amalgamating the status of the present research, but more importantly, by deriving the research areas and research streams, which can be further expanded by researchers as future research streams.

Practical implications

For the practitioners, the study aims to act as a ready reckoner repository with practice-oriented literature references to facilitate them building knowledge and taking effective strategic decisions to harness the benefits of DT more proficiently.

Originality/value

This study illustrates the bibliometric structure of the DT literature and presents insights from the growth of the literature year-on-year.

Citation

Chawla, R.N. and Goyal, P. (2022), "Emerging trends in digital transformation: a bibliometric analysis", Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 29 No. 4, pp. 1069-1112. https://doi.org/10.1108/BIJ-01-2021-0009