Digital Investment Participation and Wealth Creation: A Bibliometric Analysis of Long-Term Financial Resilience Research

Abstract

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of research at the intersection of digital investment platforms (trading apps, Robo-advisors, digital brokerages, crypto exchanges) and app-based wealth management and their relationship to long-term wealth creation and financial resilience, in an attempt to map the intellectual structure and future trajectory of the field. The study adopts the four-step bibliometric approach of Donthu et al. (2021) to establish the scope of the field, identify performance analysis and science-mapping techniques (co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling and co-word analysis), and to propose a reproducible data-collection protocol using Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection for 2010–2026, recommending VOSviewer, Bibliometrix/Biblioshiny and CiteSpace for implementation. The quantitative bibliometric run has not been completed, so citation counts, network statistics and algorithmically derived clusters are not reported. A qualitative reading of 2020–2026 literature suggests the field may provisionally organise around five recurring themes – digital financial inclusion, Robo-advisory platforms, financial and electronic literacy as antecedents of resilient investment behaviour, household-level financial resilience and the behavioural and regulatory consequences of gamified trading-app design – offered as a plausibility check to be tested against future quantitative analysis rather than as a conventional finding. The originality of the paper rests on its being one of the first to situate digital investment participation within the wealth-creation and financial-resilience literatures, rather than as a standalone fintech silo. It offers both a fully reproducible methodological template and a provisional narrative synthesis to serve as an a priori hypothesis for empirical testing in subsequent research.