Trends and patterns in digital marketing research: bibliometric analysis

In today's digital era, the importance of digital marketing has increased from one year to another as a way of providing novel properties for informing, engaging, and selling services and products to clients. The research's aim is to investigate trends and patterns in the area of digital marketing research from 1979 to June 2020 through a bibliometric analysis technique. A total of 924 articles published were obtained from the Scopus database for the analysis. In this paper, we examine variant bar charts including the year of publication, writer, publication, keyword, and country to provide more insights. Results indicated that digital marketing research steadily increased during the study period and the maximum publications occurred in the year 2019 that reach to 163 documents. The trend of publications is still growing. The top 20 documents based on the times cited per year (TCpY) were qualitatively analyzed. The largest number of multiple (MCP) and single (SCP) publications was from the USA, followed by the UK and China. The top 20 most repeated authors' keywords out of 1909 with their trends illustrated. The "real-time bidding", "machine learning", "big data", "social media marketing", and "influencer marketing" are the emerging keywords in the digital Marketing area. This bibliometric study generally provides the whole image of the field and suggests that researchers focus on novel areas to add new findings and knowledge in the literature if they conduct digital marketing research.