Quantitative Analysis of the development of digital marketing field: Bibliometric analysis and network mapping

This paper aims to uncover the knowledge structures and clusters of digital marketing and the dominant directions of growth in the field in terms of finding research topic bursts and trajectories. It also aims to identify the most influential contributors of the field. We collected and analyzed 29,123 documents indexed by the Web of Science. We incorporated various bibliometric techniques including co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and burst detection. We then mapped and visualized the findings in the form of social networks. The results of this study suggest six major research clusters within the domain of digital marketing scientific research: strategy, social media, customer behavior, economics, location data and marketing, and health marketing. The burst detection analysis also shows that the burst keywords are highly associated with the social and technological changes in the real-world. Theoretically, the findings of this research will provide a comprehensive mapping of research trends on digital marketing. The study will also shed lights on areas of traditional marketing literature that are changed by digital marketing strategies. This study can answer concerns regarding the relevance of digital marketing as a discipline with the business world.