A Systematic Literature Review of Virtual Influencers in Marketing Using Bibliometric Analysis

The study aims to recapitulate and synthesize the literature on virtual influencer which is popularly known as virtual influencer. It also aims to recommend future research propositions for virtual influencer in marketing research. The bibliographic data of 419 documents is extracted from the Scopus database after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria such as subject area, document type, and language. Both VOSviewer and Bibliometric R packages are used for the analysis. The findings show that the recent years are more productive and many authors have shown their interest to study the virtual influencer . The central themes of digital human influencer marketing research are virtual or social media influencer, information disclosure, source credibility, parasocial interaction, and authenticity & engagement. The trending themes of recent years are parasocial relationship, persuasion knowledge, authenticity, and trustworthiness. This study provides a summary of the existing literature in the area of virtual influencer and proposes future research directions. It helps to develop an understanding and roadmap for future researchers to proceed with their research in this area. It also provides them the information about what is available, what is missing, and what needs to be done.