Investigating digital sustainability: A retrospective bibliometric analysis of literature leading to future research directions

This paper provides a bibliometric analysis of the digital sustainability literature from four angles: economics, management/business, information systems/IT, and sociology/communication. The core contribution is to map the development of the literature in digital sustainability over time and across various clusters. Through VOSviewer analysis, we identify the main keywords used by the literature; the countries from which most of the literature is emerging; the most influential authors working in the field; and, their impacts by observing their citations and networks. Moreover, through CitNetExplorer analysis, we track the development of the field over time, i.e., identify key publications and divide those into clusters. The analysis finds a much more developed coverage of digital sustainability in the scholarship of management/business and therefore reveals a clear need for greater exploration of the sociological and economic aspects of digital sustainability. We argue that more robust collaboration patterns should be established among all four considered disciplines to achieve progress in digital sustainability. We envisage that digital sustainability as a field of study will mature as publications and ideas will become consolidated. Such integration strengthens the evolution of the field and topics across all four considered disciplines.