Mapping the Intellectual Structure of Intercultural Intelligence in Digitally Mediated Contexts: A Bibliometric and Thematic Analysis (2006–April 2026)
Jul 2026· Journal of Intelligence· Vol 14, pp. 125· 0 citations· 29 references
Medicine
TL;DR
The findings indicate that research output has expanded considerably since the mid-2010s, reflecting the growing importance of intercultural competencies in digitally connected environments and a deeper understanding of how intercultural intelligence scholarship is evolving in response to digital transformation.
Abstract
This study presents a bibliometric and thematic analysis of intercultural intelligence research in digitally mediated contexts. Using a dataset of 92 journal articles indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection between 2006 and April 2026, the study maps the intellectual structure, collaboration patterns, and thematic evolution of the field. Data were analyzed using the Bibliometrix R package (version 5.3.0) and Biblioshiny through performance analysis, science mapping, co-citation analysis, collaboration networks, and thematic mapping techniques. The findings indicate that research output has expanded considerably since the mid-2010s, reflecting the growing importance of intercultural competencies in digitally connected environments. The intellectual structure of the field remains strongly anchored in cultural intelligence theory while increasingly incorporating themes related to communication, trust, global virtual teams, leadership, and digitally mediated collaboration. Thematic evolution analyses reveal a gradual shift from traditional cultural intelligence constructs toward broader concerns associated with virtual interaction, digitally mediated collaboration, and emerging AI-supported communication environments. The results also demonstrate a highly collaborative and internationally connected research landscape, although notable geographical imbalances remain. By providing a systematic overview of the field, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of how intercultural intelligence scholarship is evolving in response to digital transformation and offers directions for future interdisciplinary research.
The rapid development of social media and the creator economy has positioned influencer marketing as an increasingly important phenomenon in contemporary digital society. However, the rapid expansion of research in this field has resulted in a fragmented body of knowledge, making it necessary to identify its intellectual structure and emerging research frontiers. This study aims to map the intellectual structure, thematic relationships, and temporal development of research on influencer marketing. A bibliometric analysis and science mapping approach was employed using publications indexed in Scopus from 2000 to 2026, with VOSviewer used to analyze keyword co-occurrence, thematic clusters, density, and temporal trends. The findings indicate that influencer marketing, social media, influencers, purchase intention, engagement, consumption behavior, and commerce constitute the central themes shaping the intellectual structure of the field. The analysis further reveals a thematic shift from conventional consumer-oriented research toward emerging issues involving virtual influencers, artificial intelligence, generative AI, creator economy, social commerce, green marketing, sustainable consumption, transparency, privacy, and kidfluencers. The temporal mapping suggests that influencer marketing is increasingly evolving from a promotional strategy into a broader digitally mediated social influence phenomenon involving interactions among influencers, consumers, brands, platforms, algorithms, and emerging technologies. From a social sciences perspective, these findings highlight the need to examine influencer marketing through broader theoretical lenses, including social influence, parasocial relationships, digital identity, platform society, digital labor, human–AI interaction, social norms, and digital governance. This study contributes by providing a comprehensive map of the evolution of influencer marketing and identifying future research directions at the intersection of marketing, technology, and digital social transformation.
N. Hidayati, Joko Hadi Purnomo· DISCOURSE: Indonesian Journa...· 0 citations
Although digital ethics has become increasingly important in education, systematic evidence on its global research structure and thematic development remains limited. This study aims to map global research on digital ethics in education from 2015 to 2025 using bibliometric analysis and science mapping techniques. Data were retrieved from Scopus, yielding 782 documents published in 466 sources and involving 3,993 authors. The analysis was conducted using Bibliometrix and VOSviewer to examine publication trends, citation impact, collaboration networks, keyword co-occurrence, co-citation patterns, thematic mapping, and thematic evolution. The findings reveal rapid growth in publication output and interdisciplinary collaboration, indicating the expanding scholarly relevance of digital ethics in educational research. Core keywords, including ethics, education, higher education, and female, form the intellectual backbone of the field. Network, overlay, and density visualizations show a thematic shift from methodological and COVID-19-related topics toward emerging issues such as digital literacy, AI literacy, generative AI, academic integrity, equity, and curricula. High research density remains concentrated around ethics and education, whereas AI-related themes are still comparatively underexplored. These findings highlight opportunities for future research on ethical AI literacy, AI governance, and responsible AI integration in educational curricula. This study contributes a comprehensive knowledge map by identifying leading actors, thematic domains, and research gaps, offering practical guidance for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to promote ethical, equitable, and accountable digital transformation in education.
Farid Fauzi· International Journal of Hum...· 0 citations
Digital humanities has emerged as a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field at the intersection of humanities, information science, and computational scholarship. The study employs standard bibliometric indicators and visualization techniques to analyse author productivity over time, Lotka's law of scientific productivity, most relevant countries by corresponding author, most cited countries, key word co-occurrence network, thematic mapping of terms and documents in digital humanities to understand its intellectual landscape.Authorship analysis indicates a dominance of single-authored publications, although collaborative research is also becoming increasingly prominent. United States and China emerged as the most productive countries, while citation impact was comparatively stronger in countries such as the United States, Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands. Keyword co-occurrence network and thematic analyses show that digital humanities is organized around interconnected themes such as information systems, computational models, networks, algorithms, knowledge, behaviour, impact, and scholarly communication. The study helps in understanding the intellectual and knowledge structure of digital humanities and offers insights for researchers, educators, policymakers, and library and information science professionals for conducting future studies on thematic evolution, interdisciplinary integration, and global research collaboration in the field of digital humanities.
A. S· IP Indian Journal of Library...· 0 citations
Since the end of the Cold War, Joseph S. Nye’s concept of soft power has become a central analytical framework for understanding national attraction and non-coercive influence in international relations. Despite the rapid expansion of both theoretical and empirical research, the field still lacks systematic bibliometric evidence concerning its knowledge structure, thematic evolution, and patterns of scholarly collaboration. To address this gap, this study constructs a comprehensive bibliometric map of global soft power research based on 2,772 English-language social science articles indexed in the Scopus database from 1991 to 2025. Using VOSviewer and RStudio (Biblioshiny), the analysis examines publication trends, citation structures, country collaboration networks, author co-citation relationships, keyword co-occurrence patterns, and thematic evolution pathways. The findings indicate that soft power research experienced steady growth after 2005, followed by a pronounced acceleration after 2015. While the United States, China, and the United Kingdom remain the principal research hubs, Australia emerges as an important cross-regional bridge, suggesting a shift toward a more multi-center structure of knowledge production. Keyword co-occurrence and thematic evolution further reveal a transition from early concept-oriented debates to a more diversified and policy-focused research agenda. In addition, soft power is increasingly conceptualized as an observable and comparable form of international influence, with growing attention to practical domains such as higher education cooperation, sports diplomacy, digital diplomacy, vaccine diplomacy, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Overall, this study systematically maps the intellectual structure and emerging frontiers of global soft power research, highlighting the rise of multipolar soft power and a shift toward policy-oriented and interdisciplinary inquiry, while providing a bibliometric foundation for developing measurable soft power assessment frameworks.
Na Wang, M. Ahmad· Multidisciplinary Reviews· 0 citations
As an integrated educational model that combines inquiry-based learning with travel experiences, study travel plays a significant role in fostering students’ social responsibility, innovative spirit, and practical abilities, and has attracted growing attention worldwide. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, this study conducts a systematic review of the literature published between 1950 and 2025. It identifies six major themes corresponding to the three stages of study travel. Through bibliometric analysis, the research delineates publication trends, core journal distributions, and keyword co-occurrence networks in the field. The findings indicate that experiential learning, constructivism, and transformative learning theory constitute the dominant theoretical foundations in current scholarship. Moreover, a notable “learning–travel imbalance” is observed, whereby educational processes and learning outcomes receive substantially more scholarly attention than travel attributes, industry logic, and managerial dimensions. This paper offers a systematic mapping of the knowledge terrain and theoretical architecture in international study travel research, clarifies existing gaps, and suggests directions for future interdisciplinary integration and for deeper synthesis of “learning” and “travel” in both research and practice.
Leisure extends beyond recreation and represents a social space shaped by cultural values, economic conditions, spatial arrangements, and institutional structures. Social cohesion reflects the level of trust, connectedness, and shared belonging within communities, and leisure settings often function as social arenas where cohesion can either be strengthened or weakened depending on accessibility, inclusivity, policy support, and cultural relevance. This study presents a bibliometric review of literature on leisure and social cohesion to examine its conceptual development, intellectual structure, and emerging research trends. A total of 20,070 records were retrieved from the WOS for the period 2000–2025, of which 3,933 documents met the inclusion criteria. Using CiteSpace version 6.4.R1, co-citation, co-authorship, institutional, country, and keyword co-occurrence analyses were conducted to map collaboration networks, leading institutions, influential authors, and dominant thematic clusters. The results show a steady increase in publications after 2000, confirming the growing interdisciplinary nature of research linking leisure, tourism, community development, and social capital. Major clusters include COVID-19 pandemic, tourism destinations, social capital, government trust, sharing economy, and community participation. Influential works by Forrest and Kearns (2001), Putnam (2000), Gössling et al. (2020), Friedkin (2004), and Nunkoo (2011) form the intellectual foundation of the field. The United States, England, and China are the most productive countries, while leading institutions include the State University System of Florida, University of Johannesburg, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, University of London, and University of Waterloo. Leisure emerges as a conditional mechanism for social cohesion shaped by structural inequalities and institutional support.
O. J. Olabiyi, N. Roman, Chanté Johannes et al.· International Journal of the...· 0 citations