A systematic review of research on digital mobile payment apps

• A systematic bibliometric review of DMPA research from 2013 to 2023 is presented. • Visual analysis reveals evolving themes, co-authorship patterns, and knowledge clusters. • Shift identified from adoption models to platform governance and infrastructure studies. • Stakeholder ecosystems and regional disparities remain underexplored in current research. • A future research agenda is proposed focusing on design, regulation, and inclusion. Digital Mobile Payment Applications (DMPAs) have become critical components of contemporary digital economies, mediating not only financial transactions but also platform governance, user behavior, and socio-technical regulation. While scholarly inquiry into DMPAs remains theoretically fragmented, with insufficient integration across behavioral, institutional, and infrastructural perspectives. This study addresses this gap through a systematic bibliometric review of 461 peer-reviewed articles published between 2013 and 2023, retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection. Employing VOSviewer and CiteSpace, we map the field’s intellectual structure through co-authorship networks, disciplinary collaborations, and thematic keyword clustering. While user-centric frameworks remain prevalent, our findings reveal a growing, yet underdeveloped, body of work on platform governance, stakeholder dynamics, and cross-border regulatory asymmetries. We argue for a shift beyond technocentric models toward multi-stakeholder, infrastructural, and cross-cultural analyses, grounded in critical digital infrastructure studies. The study concludes with a future research agenda that advances interdisciplinary integration and addresses regulatory heterogeneity to better conceptualize DMPAs as evolving socio-technical systems.