Digital Platforms, Digital Ecosystems and the Role of Emerging (Digital) Technologies: A Bibliometric Analysis

This research aims to observe the academic discourse developed around digital platforms and digital ecosystems, considering their interconnection with emerging technologies. The study adopts a bibliometric approach to analyze, in a systematic and repeatable manner, 1392 academic contributions published on digital platforms and ecosystems over a time span from 2001 to mid-May 2022. First, we highlighted the key characteristics of the discussion around the topics and the academic community involved in terms of publication and citation trends, the most productive authors and countries, and the most influential authors and articles. Then, we conducted a co-word analysis to observe and analyze the conceptual structure of the dataset. The findings indicate that in the last 10 years has there been a significant growth in academic interest in this research area. The academic discourse on digital platforms is more developed than that on ecosystems, and this could be explained by the various facets and types that result in a broader application of the former topic, which began to be discussed in the early 2000s. The results of the co-word analysis show a strong presence of digital technologies, which was investigated in greater detail to determine the possible influence exerted by technologies on the literature related to the research topics considered. This study provides research insights and suggestions for exploring the knowledge gap identified, namely how emerging technologies interact with digital platforms and ecosystems, as well as analyzing the phenomenon’s inevitable further evolution.