The trend and future of techno-ethics: a bibliometric analysis of three decades
Abstract
Purpose
With the growth and profound influence of technology on our life, it is important to address the ethical issues inherent to the development and deployment of technology. Researchers and practitioners submit the need to inspect: how technology and ethics interact, how ethical principles regulate technology and what could be the probable future course of action to execute techno-ethical practices in a socio-technical discourse effectively. To address the thoughts related to techno-ethics, the authors of the present study conducted exploratory research to understand the trend and relevance of technology ethics since its inception.
Design/methodology/approach
The study collected over 679 documents for the period 1990–2022 from the Scopus database. A quantitative approach of bibliometric analysis was conducted to study the pattern of authorship, publications, citations, prominent journals and contributors in the subject area. VOS viewer software was utilized to visualize and map academic performance in techno-ethics.
Findings
The findings revealed that the concept of techno-ethics is an emerging field and requires more investigation to harness its relevance with everchanging technology development. The data revealed substantial growth in the field of techno-ethics in humanities, social science and management domain in the last two decades. Also, most of the prominent cited references and documents in the database tend to cover the theme of Artificial Intelligence, Big data, computer ethics, morality, decision-making, IT ethics, human rights, responsibility and privacy.
Originality/value
The article provides a comprehensive overview of scientific production and main research trends in techno-ethics until 2022. The study is a pioneer in expanding the academic productivity and performance of embedding ethics in technology.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express our sincere gratitude to the academicians and researchers who generously and continuously worked in the field of techno-ethics and contributed in the expansion of research horizons. The authors extend appreciation to the reviewers who provided constructive feedback and helped improve the quality of this paper. Lastly, the authors would like to thank the editorial team of Library Hi Tech for the support and guidance provided throughout the publication process.
Funding: This research was conducted without external funding. The authors have not received any financial support for this work and have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Citation
Verma, S. and Garg, N. (2023), "The trend and future of techno-ethics: a bibliometric analysis of three decades", Library Hi Tech, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-10-2022-0477
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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