In an era of rapidly evolving digital landscapes, business activity within virtual worlds—particularly the metaverse—has become increasingly important for innovation, stakeholder engagement, and global economic growth. This study employs a comprehensive bibliometric analysis to examine growth trends, leading authors, influential publications, emerging themes, and keyword patterns in research on virtual worlds and business, using documents retrieved from the Scopus database. To ensure analytical robustness, the study combines multiple bibliometric tools, including R (Bibliometrix/Biblioshiny), VOSviewer, and Publish or Perish. The findings reveal several important patterns. First, annual publication output shows a clear upward trajectory, with a marked acceleration after 2021, likely driven by technological advances and heightened digital engagement during and after the COVID-19 period. Second, the geographical distribution of publications highlights the USA, China, India, and the UK as major contributors, while institutions such as the University of Macau emerge as influential research hubs. Third, analysis of highly cited publications identifies foundational themes related to social media, virtual environments, immersion, and the evolving business potential of the metaverse. Finally, keyword co-occurrence and clustering analyses reveal distinct thematic areas that reflect diverse strategic applications of virtual worlds across business domains. This study contributes a long-term intellectual map of metaverse-related business research and provides insights for scholars, managers, and policymakers seeking to understand the evolution and strategic implications of virtual worlds in the digital economy. Practical implications, limitations, and directions for future research are also discussed.

Business research is facing the challenge of scattered knowledge, particularly in the realm of brand loyalty (BL). Although literature reviews on BL exist, they predominantly concentrate on the pre-sent state, neglecting future trends. Therefore, a comprehensive review is imperative to ascertain emerging trends in BL This study employs a bibliometric approach, analyzing 1,468 papers from the Scopus database. Various tools including R software, VOS viewer software, and Publish or Perish are utilized. The aim is to portray the knowledge map, explore the publication years, identify the top authors and their co-occurrence, reliable documents, institutions, subjects, research hotspots, and pioneering countries and universities in the study of BL. The qualitative section of this research identifies gaps and emerging trends in BL through Word Cloud charts, word growth analysis, and a review of highly cited articles from the past four years. Results showed that highly cited articles mention topics such as brand love, consumer-brand identification, and social networks and the U.S. had the most productions in this field. Besides, most citations were related to Keller with 1,173 citations. Furthermore, in the qualitative section, social networks and brand experiences were found to be of interest to researchers in the field. Finally, by introducing the antecedents and consequences of BL, the gaps and emerging trends in BL were identified, so as to present the di-rection of future research in this area.

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a profound catalyst for digital transformation, radically reshaping business models, consumer behavior, and organizational strategies globally. This study employs a bibliometric approach, analyzing 527 publications from the Scopus database to examine how digital business research evolved during this period. Various tools including R software, VOS viewer software, and Publish or Perish are utilized. The aim is to portray the knowledge map, explore the publication years, identify the top authors and their co-occurrence, reliable documents, institutions, subjects, research hotspots, and pioneering countries and universities in the study of digital business. Results indicate consistent annual growth in publication output, accompanied by a decline in average citations per article. This pattern may reflect the “dilution effect” commonly observed in rapidly expanding fields; however, the absence of a pre-pandemic baseline warrants cautious interpretation of this trend. International collaboration proved robust, with strong co-authorship networks led by the United States and China. Thematic analysis identified core research clusters around e-commerce, consumer behavior, supply chain resilience, and digital marketing, underpinned by highly cited studies on pandemic-driven behavioral shifts and technological adaptation. Co-citation analysis revealed four foundational clusters: direct economic impacts, statistical methodologies, digital transformation, and policy responses. Despite these advances, significant research gaps remain, including the long-term implications of digital transformation for business models, the use of advanced analytical methods to study crisis-driven consumer behavior, and comparative policy analyses extending beyond the Chinese context. This review maps the intellectual structure of digital commerce during a global crisis and identifies opportunities for future research to enhance resilience and adaptability in digital ecosystems.