Mapping digitally mediated youth community-benefit engagement: a bibliometric analysis of volunteering, service-learning and digital civic participation

Abstract

Background Research on how young people volunteer and contribute to their communities in digitally shaped contexts has accumulated in parallel strands across education, communication, and youth studies, without an integrated picture. The elasticity of the civic engagement construct compounds this dispersion. This study adopts an explicit boundary: it maps community-benefit engagement, that is, volunteering, service-learning, and civically oriented activity directed at the benefit of others, and excludes political participation by construct definition. Methods The study analysed 310 English-language articles and reviews indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (2006–2026). Records were screened along four axes against the declared construct boundary and refined by a targeted content audit, with LLM-supported abstract reading as structured decision support. Using bibliometrix and VOSviewer, the analysis combined performance analysis with co-word and thematic mapping, co-citation analysis, reference publication year spectroscopy, and citation-genealogy analysis. Results The corpus is recent and dispersed: 310 documents across 251 journals, with little author continuity. Across four complementary views, service-learning emerges as the principal organisational frame. Digital technology is present throughout but does not form a single consolidated pillar; digital terms distribute across civic-development, social-media, inclusion, and service-learning clusters, indicating a cross-cutting, context-dependent role. Volunteering is visible but neither central nor autonomous, and no coherent digital-volunteering theme emerged under the present definition and parameters. The intellectual core rests on two interlinked streams: a civic participation and social capital canon rooted around 2000, and a recent service-learning evaluation literature. Production concentrates in the United States and China; Türkiye contributes five documents, a reading conditioned by the English-language, single-database frame. Conclusions The study gives a dispersed literature an integrated science map under a transparent construct boundary, and converts its thin regions, in volunteering vocabulary, theoretical consolidation, and measurement, into a concrete research agenda.