A Transdisciplinary Research Agenda for the Sharing Economy in BRICS: Co-producing platform knowledge with workers, users, communities, and public institutions

This paper develops a transdisciplinary agenda for BRICS sharing-economy scholarship. Itasks how bibliometric mapping can be connected to knowledge co-produced with workers,users, communities, firms and public institutions. The evidence is a Web of Science corpus of443 records, mapped with VOSviewer, together with the earlier bibliometric work of Duan andSandhu (2023). Three observations shape the agenda. First, the maps show a field witheconomic, sustainability, tourism and digital concerns, and each BRICS country is tied to adifferent set of topics: environmental and business terms for China, consumer adoption forBrazil and India, and tourism and ride-hailing for South Africa. Second, formal co-authorshipand keyword ties cannot stand in for community participation. Third, the five BRICS countriesfall into five separate clusters in the country coupling map, so comparison cannot assume ashared body of knowledge. The paper therefore treats maps as prompts for choosing questionsand stakeholders, and it proposes a staged process for validating constructs and outcomes withaffected groups. A next phase should give local participants a defined role in researchgovernance and interpretation.