The ascendance of trust-based influencer marketing: a hybrid bibliometric-systematic literature review of consumer behaviour (2016–2025)

Social media has grown in popularity over the last decade, creating new opportunities for influencer marketing and reshaping how consumers make purchasing decisions. While prior reviews have mapped this field’s overall growth and its dominant theoretical lenses (chiefly Source Credibility Theory and Parasocial Interaction), the extent to which these lenses have been tested across, rather than within, generational cohorts have not been established. The current study employs a combination of Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and Bibliometrics analysis to explore the intellectual structure, development of themes, and generational focus of research on influencer marketing conducted between 2016 and 2025. The bibliographic analysis of dataset extracted from Scopus was examined using bibliometrix R package, specifically its Biblioshiny interface. The systematic qualitative synthesis of the highly cited papers was also made. The results show sustained growth in influencer marketing research from 2020 onward, alongside a concentration of studies on Generation Z relative to cross-generational comparison. Building on this evidence, the study proposes a structured, theoretically grounded agenda for cross-generational influencer marketing research, offering both a methodological reference point for future bibliometric-SLR reviews and a practical roadmap for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand influencer effectiveness across generational audiences.