Intellectual Structure of Social Credit System Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

With the development of digital analytics, big data provides many conveniences in governments, businesses, and individual lives; but it also causes many ethical considerations around the datafication. The Chinese Social Credit System (SCS), a big data-enabled system aiming to promote the culture of sincerity by tracking performance of individuals and businesses, provides an interesting context to study these ethical considerations. The SCS has emerged as a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in recent years. In this article, we provide a bibliometric analysis and a systematic literature review to understand the current intellectual structure of this interdisciplinary phenomenon through identifying article categories, key themes, theoretical debates, and its impacts. Our research contributes to the SCS and data justice literature by providing future research dimensions. Additionally, by providing a comprehensive understanding of the SCS, we also make a practical contribution to the field.