Mediatisation: Mapping the conceptual terrain

Integration of media into various aspects of daily life, which is referred to as mediatisation (or mediatization), has become increasingly pervasive in the contemporary world. It has been further accelerated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic that led individuals to rely heavily on digital media for communication and information. While past studies have explored the general and critical reviews of mediatisation, a systematic review of mediatisation is missing. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap by conducting a systematic review using bibliometric analysis of publications on mediatisation to identify pertinent information in this research area. Using SCOPUS, the largest database for indexed multidisciplinary research, the study identifies the growth and interest of publications on mediatisation, primary sources of publication, productive authors, geographic distribution of contributions, institutional contributions, and keywords used in this field. VOSviewer 1.6.19 software was used to analyse and visualise the collected bibliometric data through network visualisation, overlay visualisation, and density visualisation. A total of 1,711 documents were analysed and the top 20 were shortlisted for this research. The scope of data is from 1999 to 2023. The most productive scholar in the field of mediatisation is Andreas Hepp from University of Bremen in Germany, with an H-index of 56. However, the most highly cited is Mazzoleni's work from 1999 which is widely used as a benchmark in this field. In terms of top universities that produce research on mediatisation, the top 10 are situated in Europe. For author keywords, while the dominant ones are "mediatisation" and "media," a new wave of keywords is taking over such as "COVID-19, deep mediatisation, datafication, digital media, digital religion, Twitter, and China." This study takes on a comprehensive approach and provides insights into the current state of research on mediatisation and suggests recommendations for future study.