What's on the horizon? A bibliometric analysis of personal data collection methods on social networks

Abstract

In Digital Marketing, the capture of consumers’ personal data from social networks is essential for better targeting of commercial actions. The methods for collecting this information are arousing growing interest among the scientific community. This paper offers a comprehensive review of the literature on the issue and its management. To this end, a bibliometric study of 866 publications on the Web of Science between 1997 and 2022 was conducted to identify the most relevant trends through analysis of the most significant articles, keywords, authors, institutions and countries. In addition, visualisation software (VOS) was used to illustrate the relationships established through bibliographic coupling, keyword co-occurrence, authors and co-citation. The results indicate that the USA and Australia are the countries that publish the most in this field, while Finland and Australia have the highest number of publications per capita. Finally, the progress of research is discussed and future research directions are suggested.