The Relationship between Sustainable Development and Digital Transformation: Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Digital transformation is becoming an integral component of sustainable development for different scales of activity: meta-, mega-, macro, meso-, and microlevels. The aim of the article is to identify the relationship between sustainable development and digital transformation by characterising the evolution of key patterns of scientific publications on this issue. The goal is achieved by forming a relevant sample of scientific articles based on the identification of periods of publication activity, as well as by performing bibliometric analysis of keywords coincidence to identify promising areas of research in this area. On the one hand, categories such as "sustainable development" or "sustainability" and, on the other hand, categories describing digital transformation. The generated sample of publications for the study includes 9,527 articles and conference papers indexed by the scientific metrics database Scopus for the period 1990-2023. The bibliometric analysis and visualisation of its results were carried out using the VOSviewer software product. On the basis of the visualisation maps, five clusters were identified and characterised based on the meaningful coincidence of keywords in articles and five stages of evolutionary development of the issues of sustainable development and digitalisation. Based on the analysis of empirical data, exponential growth in the number of publications in the context of the relationship between digital technologies and economic, environmental and social sustainability was confirmed (the annual increase in the number of articles on this topic is 36%). The results of the analysis can be used in future research related to sustainable development and digital transformation.