Digitalization in the event industry: a bibliometric analysis

Purpose

The paper aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art of the event industry in the context of digitalization to understand how digital technologies change the event industry and what research topics are the most promising for further exploration.

Design/methodology/approach

A bibliometric analysis of the existing body of knowledge on the topic was conducted and the results were visualized using CiteSpace 5.8.R3. A total of 1999 articles and proceeding papers from the Web of Science Core Collection published between 2007 and 2022 were selected for our analysis. Based on the articles and proceeding papers in the Web of Science Core Collection database, we selected a set of publications for our analysis. The data were obtained through specific keywords related to our research topic. The method involves a process of three main stages: data collection, data processing and the bibliometric analysis.

Findings

Co-citation analysis indicated that issues of crowd management and tracking human mobility during mass events are important for the event industry and that technologies such as the Internet of Things, special-purpose mobile applications and systems make it easier for an event organizer to handle the issues. The findings demonstrated a weak scientific collaboration between countries in the topic studied and shift of research hotspots to study of satisfaction, motivation and behavioral patterns of events attendees. Based on this analysis, three directions for future research were revealed.

Research limitations/implications

The results should be interpreted in light of our sample, because the analysis was conducted within our sample which has boundaries. We collected data from all categories in the Web of Science Core Collection database, but we considered only articles and proceeding papers as opposed to all possible types of scientific publications and other databases. In the study, we focused on detecting the state-of-the-art of the event industry in the context of digitalization overall. More specific topics that could be analyzed remain, for example, the dependency of digital technologies from the event type, etc.

Practical implications

This study reflects the state-of-the-art of the event industry in the context of digitalization. It provides researchers with key developmental trends in the event industry, which assists them in more deeply understanding the evolution of research hotspots in the field during last 15 years and defining future research agenda. The paper presents an overview of digital technologies used in various types of events and describes the issues and results related to the implementing digital technologies. The results obtained were extremely important, as they can be used by event managers and organizers to enhance customers’ experience during the events.

Originality/value

This study reflects the state-of-the-art of the event industry in the context of digitalization. This is the first attempt to make an overall analysis of scientific papers published in the Web of Science Core Collection on the topic studied without excluding any categories. The search procedure is transparent, and the results can be reproduced in other search fields using the same approach. Based on this analysis, three directions for future research were revealed including technological aspects of online event-based social networks, issues of crowd management and security at mass events and issues of attendees’ acceptance of novel digital technologies.