Unlocking the potential of metaverse: a bibliometric and topic modelling approach of key drivers and barriers

Purpose This research aims to explore the untapped potential of the metaverse by analysing studies related to the drivers and barriers of the metaverse, by identifying new trends, patterns and themes associated with the rapidly growing technology. Design/methodology/approach This study analyses the articles by using a combined bibliometric and topic modelling technique. Here, 890 articles collected from the Scopus database, published between 2007 and 2024, have been utilised. Bibliometric tools such as R-Biblioshiny and ScientoPy have been used for mapping the intellectual landscape, and VOSviewer has been employed for network visualisation. Moreover, the thematic representation has also been performed using LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) analysis, implemented over R’s topicmodels package, to discover the fundamental topics and relate them to one another. Findings The study reveals that China is the most contributing country, institute of electrical and electronics engineers (IEEE) Access emerges as the most influential source and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, stands out as the top relevant affiliation, among others. Further, the results of the topic modelling reveal five themes: user challenges and potential, immersive technologies and learning, technological challenges and potential, digital and social framework, and future opportunities for learning and social experiences. Originality/value To the best of author’s knowledge, this is the first study that combines bibliometric and topic modelling techniques to analyse the state of research on the drivers and barriers of the metaverse.