The landscape of Digital Nudging Research: A Bibliometric Review of Gaps, Emerging Themes, and Future Research Directions

Abstract

Introduction:

Digital technologies are shaping decision-making more and more in areas like banking, retail, healthcare, and public services. As an answer to the challenges of complicated choice environments which may lead to cognitive overload, digital nudging has arisen as a behavioural intervention designed to alter user decision-making in predictable ways through subtle changes in the interface design without restricting freedom of choice. Theoretical integration and cumulative knowledge development are challenges, as research on digital nudging is scarce and dispersed in different scholarly disciplines despite an increasing interest.

Objectives:

The purpose of this study is to systematically map the intellectual structure and evolution, identify key themes and influential contributors in digital nudging research, as well as to explore critical research gaps for future scholarly inquiry.

Methods:

The research conducts a bibliometric and conceptual analysis of 605 publications dated from 2002 to 2025 based on the Web Science database. The analysis uses Biblioshiny from R and includes descriptive performance indicators such as publications, authorship patterns, co-word analysis of thematic mapping and collaboration analysis to investigate publication trends, thematic structure, and intellectual origins of the field.

Results:

The results show that digital nudging is an emerging and multidisciplinary area of research, where behavioral economics, information systems and marketing contribute predominantly. Behaviour, information, and intervention effect are core themes; emerging areas like ethics, privacy and trust remain underdeveloped. Existing work is heavily biased toward low-dimensional, short-term experimental designs with relatively few longitudinal studies and little consideration of the underlying psychological mechanisms. In addition, gaps related to AI-driven nudging, cultural and institutional contexts of AI, and governance frameworks are identified.

Conclusions:

Almost all studies focus on specific applications of digital nudging (e.g., notifications, social norms) and thus lack theoretical perspective, as it tries to identify underlying mechanisms taking place in multiple settings based on the same theoretical framework (Fischer et al., 2020), while utilizing diverse ways of informing users. This study contributes to developing a fresh, integrated, ethically well-founded, and methodologically sound research agenda by identifying seven main Research Gaps and twenty-eight future research questions. The results are helpful for researchers, practitioners and policymakers who need to design responsible and effective digital interventions.