The trend and future of techno-ethics: a bibliometric analysis of three decades

Abstract

PurposeWith the growth and profound influence of technology on our life, it is important to address the ethical issues inherent to the development and deployment of technology. Researchers and practitioners submit the need to inspect: how technology and ethics interact, how ethical principles regulate technology and what could be the probable future course of action to execute techno-ethical practices in a socio-technical discourse effectively. To address the thoughts related to techno-ethics, the authors of the present study conducted exploratory research to understand the trend and relevance of technology ethics since its inception.Design/methodology/approachThe study collected over 679 documents for the period 1990–2022 from the Scopus database. A quantitative approach of bibliometric analysis was conducted to study the pattern of authorship, publications, citations, prominent journals and contributors in the subject area. VOS viewer software was utilized to visualize and map academic performance in techno-ethics.FindingsThe findings revealed that the concept of techno-ethics is an emerging field and requires more investigation to harness its relevance with everchanging technology development. The data revealed substantial growth in the field of techno-ethics in humanities, social science and management domain in the last two decades. Also, most of the prominent cited references and documents in the database tend to cover the theme of Artificial Intelligence, Big data, computer ethics, morality, decision-making, IT ethics, human rights, responsibility and privacy.Originality/valueThe article provides a comprehensive overview of scientific production and main research trends in techno-ethics until 2022. The study is a pioneer in expanding the academic productivity and performance of embedding ethics in technology.

Editorial: Special selection on current bibliometrics and reviews

“…Tyagi (2024b) investigated the research productivity of the top four premier Indian Institute of Management (IIM) institutions and found a trend of increasing publication, which involves wide collaboration with 125 countries worldwide. Readers may also be interested in reading articles related to research trends in library and information science (Wijewickrema, 2023; Zhu, 2023), techno-ethics (Verma and Garg, 2023) and massive open online courses (MOOCs) (Cheng et al , 2023; Ratnasari et al , 2024).…”

A bibliometric analysis of immersive technology in museum exhibitions: exploring user experience

“…In the field of library and information science, bibliometrics stands as a valuable quantitative research methodology. This approach leverages statistical and quantitative analyses to illuminate the publication patterns within a specific discipline or body of literature (Verma and Garg, 2023). Bibliometrics' strength rests in its capacity to map out the progression of research disciplines over time.…”