Gamification Research in View of Bibliometrics: A Literature Trend, Bibliographic Coupling, and Co-citation Analysis: An Abstract

Gamification, the use of game designs and mechanics, has been used to enhance marketing effectiveness. Over the past decade, advertising in games and persuasive advergames have been the two types of engaging technologies for promoting brands. However, it is becoming difficult for researchers in various disciplines to evaluate the impacts of gamification. Researchers and marketers have thus called for research that can provide well-thought-out gamification strategies as well as a thorough review of the state of the literature. The authors answer that call by proposing a bibliometric approach, which offers quantitative analytical tools to provide a more comprehensive overview of the literature. We particularly intend to go above and beyond a simple counting of publications or citations. The present study aims to map out the meaningful citation-based links between and among gamification research documents, and we hope to provide a visual representation of complex, networked, scholarly works.

To clearly reveal the intellectual structure of gamification research, the authors compile bibliometric data using the ISI Web of Science, and identified 94 scholarly documents that were published in 32 different scholarly sources by 202 authors within the time period 1995–2018 (1697 citations and 3543 cited references), mostly from advertising and business fields. The authors first used a bibliographic coupling to measure a relationship between citing documents. The result shows the existence of five distinct clusters based on the coupling strength (e.g., research on gamification and cognitive reactions as marketing outcomes), which helps us detect different topical areas and identify new directions of research. The authors further map the intellectual tradition of gamification by assessing the relationship between cited documents. The co-citation analysis allows us to see the existence of six different thematic classifications and their theoretical foundations (e.g., research on gamification in the context of advertising literacy and consumers’ use of persuasion knowledge). The present research is among the first to apply both bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis in exploring the forefront of gamification research and its intellectual heritage.