Purpose This article constitutes a synthesis of the intellectual history of the area of virtual and extended reality (VR/XR) services in academic libraries during the first two decades, tracing the intellectual history of the Second Life experimentation, to current metaverse models and pinpointing structural tendencies, intellectual lineages and gaps in the systemic research. Design/methodology/approach This analysis provides the most comprehensive empirical consolidation of two decades of XR scholarship in academic libraries and advances the first systematic bibliometric synthesis of the field, establishing a robust evidence base for institutional metaverse strategy. Concurrently, a structured bibliometric and thematic framework was applied to 191 peer-reviewed documents retrieved from Scopus through a tripartite Boolean search with predefined eligibility criteria; metadata were processed in Python and analysed in R, while Claude AI supported bibliographic visualisation, strategic mapping and analysis of co-authorship, citation and technology term trajectories. Findings The field between Second Life and the metaverse is characterised by four different eras. A post-2021 bifurcated citation trend and a low level of international collaboration of 6.8 are evidence of uneven maturation. The peripheral position of research support services and the ethical needs of AI, convergent with XR convergence, constitute a profoundly incomplete scholarly agenda. Originality/value This investigation presents the most comprehensive empirical compilation of two decades of XR scholarship in academic libraries and delivers the first systematic bibliometric synthesis of this literature, establishing a robust evidence base for informing institutional metaverse strategies.
Malik et al. (Sun,) studied this question.