A bibliometric and multi-disciplinary quasi-systematic analysis of social robots: Past, future, and insights of human-robot interaction

Social robots and their novel applications are slowly emerging to become an indispensable part of society and businesses. While the field of social robotics has been very multidisciplinary since its inception, currently, there is a scarcity of reviews that takes stock of all the past and present literature to critically, comprehensively, and holistically understand how business and management and social science scholars can develop scholarship and contribute to social robotics research. To fill this gap in the literature, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of 4211 articles gathered from Web of Science and SCOPUS databases from all disciplines contributing to understanding social robots area to describe the intellectual and conceptual structures of research in social robots. This is followed by a quasi-systematic review of themes identified in bibliometric analysis to critically analyze the knowledge gaps in existing research and develop research questions that will help in the diffusion and adoption of this technology within the consumer and business space, irrespective of the application sector. Our findings show that better conceptualization of social robots (what they are), acceptance studies in the approximation phase of adoption, and developing measures for cyber resilience and human-centric design will shape societal and organizational perception.