Trends in Digital Marketing Research: A Bibliometric Analysis.

Digital marketing is a modern strategy used by most businesses to increase sales. The Covid-19 pandemic made its use even more important. Recognizing the significance of digital marketing in practice, academics have conducted extensive research. Accordingly, this paper presents the findings from a bibliometric analysis of 1374 publications in digital marketing from the Scopus database between 1985 and 2020 to understand this trend better. Our research focuses on the publication outlet, research area, authorship, and keyword/citation analysis. In short, we found that publications in digital marketing have increased exponentially in the last decade and are primarily in business management and computer science studies. The contributors are diverse across developed and developing countries, mainly from the United States, India, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia. Lastly, we identified several emerging themes: big data, data mining, and artificial intelligence. This study advances current and future digital marketing research knowledge to benefit academics, policymakers, and practitioners.