Paper Companion Website 

The Evolution of Research on the Digital Economy

Interdisciplinary research increasingly attracts substantial funding due to its potential to address complex questions by integrating diverse perspectives. Research on the digital economy is an interdisciplinary field that has emerged organically, driven by the transformative impact of advancements in digital technologies. This meta-study provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of digital economy research, from early internet studies to the rise of digital platforms and the current age of artificial intelligence (AI). After collecting 8,446 papers presented at 197 leading conferences in the field between 1989 and 2024, I enrich the dataset with information on abstracts, authors, and journals from Google Scholar, OpenAlex, and the SSRN Economics of Networks eJournal. The yearly number of conferences, papers, and contributing researchers highlights strong growth in the field. Using natural language processing (NLP), including topic modeling, I identify key research topics and trends and uncover a shift from theoretical exploration to empirical validation and application over time. The findings reveal changes in contributions across disciplines such as economics, information systems, computer science, and management, with management emerging as the dominant discipline in recent years. Furthermore, the results show increasing global dispersion and interconnectedness within the research community, although North American and European institutions remain dominant.

The figure illustrates the annual cumulative number of conferences on digital economy research hosted in each country between 1989 and 2024.

The word clouds illustrate the changing prominence of terms in digital economy research from 1989 to 2024.

The figure illustrates the cumulative weight of authors' institutions over time (1989, 2001–2024).