A Bibliometric Analysis of Virtual Influencers as a Trend in Digital Marketing: Insights from WOS

With the development of digital technology, virtual influencers are becoming an important part of a rapidly growing trend in digital marketing. The purpose of this paper, based on the conducted desk research, is to analyze publications related to virtual influencers based on data obtained from the WoS platform. This paper employs typical bibliometric analysis to identify research productivity, types of documents and sources, publication languages, geographical distribution of publications, and identifies the most active organizations, authors, keywords, along with a citation analysis. The results show that the concept of virtual influencers began to be researched in 2020, but also that in 2023, a significant increase in the scientific literature was recorded. This research is one of the few attempts to analyse virtual influencers, which is certainly one of the future trends, using bibliometric analysis based on previously published articles, and the first one using the VOSviewer software for visualization of results.