Ownership-Preserving Autonomy in Creative Human–Robot Interaction: A Scientometric and Systematic Literature Review

As robots take on a growing role in creative work, an important question is often overlooked: how do we preserve people’s sense of psychological ownership over what they create together with a machine? This study integrates a large-scale scientometric analysis of 817 publications (2015–July 2026) with a PRISMA 2020–guided systematic review of 52 studies on Ownership-Preserving Autonomy in creative Human–Robot Interaction (HRI). Bibliometric mapping (a keyword co-occurrence network built with NetworkX and Louvain community detection, together with publication-trend, citation, author, country, and keyword temporal-intensity statistics computed directly from the corpus) shows a compound annual growth rate of approximately 26.5% over the complete calendar years 2018–2025, as well as a Core HRI and Autonomy thematic cluster that dominates a much smaller Psychological and Ownership cluster, a pattern that is at least partly attributable to the intentionally broad search strategy. The systematic review shows that only 3.8% of the 52 studies (n = 2) report a concrete algorithmic implementation coupled with robotic integration and empirical evaluation, while 96.2% do not meet this specific implementation criterion. Considered alongside converging industrial and HCI evidence on authorship erosion in AI-assisted design, as well as a previously reported ∼20% ownership decline under passive AI use in a single non-embodied creative-writing study, these SLR findings point to a pronounced theory–practice gap: rich conceptual discussion of ownership, agency, and Diminished Creative Agency contrasts sharply with the scarcity of technical implementations, validated evaluation frameworks, and real-world deployments. To help bridge this gap, the paper offers an exploratory positioning of Ownership–Autonomy Adaptive Collaboration (OAAC), a preliminary four-layer conceptual reference model; a set of falsifiable research hypotheses; and a structured research agenda on dynamic scaffolding, negotiated autonomy, and multidimensional evaluation intended to guide future ownership-preserving, human-centric co-creativity research in Industry 5.0.