Bibliometric research on the ecosystem of digital business platforms

Abstract

Digital transformation led to the development of novel business models and enabled the establishment of the digital business platforms ecosystem. Research on this interdisciplinary topic is wide but lacks cohesion. This paper aims at disclosing trends in the assessment of the scientific literature about the ecosystem of digital business platforms by using bibliometric methods such as citation analysis and co-word analysis. A dataset of 649 papers extracted from Web of Science database was used. VOSviewer was used to create maps based on the generated bibliographic data, including authors’ names, journals, and keywords. Our results show that the most influential authors in the field are Venkatraman, N. Venkat (815 citations), Bharadwaj, Anandhi (755 citations), and El Sawy, Omar (755 citations); the most influential journal is MIS Quarterly: Management Information Systems (2178 citations); and the main keywords are digital platform(s), digitalization, digital transformation, platforms, and business model – they are the tenets of the conceptual structure of the topic. This article contributes to a better understanding and profiling of the research bibliometrics in value co-creation in the ecosystem of digital business models.