Metaverse changing realm of the business world: a bibliometric snapshot

Abstract

PurposeDigital disruption has posed challenges to managers. Metaverse is one of the fastest-growing digital transformations (DTs) impacting business across the globe. There needs to be more literature on the academic prospect relating to metaverse. This article aims to analyze and evaluate the publications to highlight themes, opportunities and contemporary challenges of metaverse in business management to get insights about the challenges posed to managers through such transformation.Design/methodology/approachOver 74 articles from 2006 to 2022 were collected using the Scopus database. These were further analyzed to understand how previous research captures metaverse in the domain of business management and the amount to which has been studied in terms of publication productivity, country productivity, affiliation productivity and author productivity, Top-cited documents, keywords analysis, network visualization of keywords and bibliometric coupling. The authors also gathered literature related to metaverse in the field of business management and its uses for managers.FindingsThe authors' findings reveal that metaverse in business management has gained momentum in publications since 2022. Approximately 68% of total publications and 56% of total citations were from 2022. USA is the flagbearer of metaverse around the globe and the University of Georgia is leading in affiliation productivity. Network analysis through Vosviewer shows that keywords metaverse and virtual reality (VR) have the highest co-occurrences and link strength.Originality/valueThis article is relevant to those interested in how the world of virtual workspace is making a paradigm shift in management development. This study aims to review previous literary works through bibliometrics and visualization approaches comprehensively. Metaverse is changing the schema of the business world in terms of various strategies that this article addressed. Such studies have not been previously carried out.