Twenty-five years of privacy in advertising: a bibliometric analysis and thematic review

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of 25 years of research on privacy in advertising. Using a hybrid approach, we combined bibliometric analysis with qualitative thematic review to systematically examine 389 articles from the Web of Science and Scopus. Through bibliometric techniques, we mapped key research trends, highly cited authors, and intellectual structures. To further enhance our analysis, we performed an in-depth thematic review, synthesizing insights from the most-cited articles across different periods to identify long-standing debates, emerging topics, and future research directions. This process combined manual in-depth reading with automated full-text analysis, ensuring a data-driven validation of thematic shifts over time. Our findings show significant growth in privacy-focused advertising research, particularly since 2019. The study highlights the interdisciplinary nature of privacy in advertising, with contributions spanning communication, computer science, marketing, and law, and presents a future research agenda to address evolving privacy concerns in the digital advertising landscape.