Unleashing the potential of chatbots in business: A bibliometric analysis

Chatbots are increasingly becoming a fundamental part of social life. They allow us to communicate in more sophisticated ways using the internet. It is crucial to study chatbots to gain comprehensive insights into their developments, trends, impact, and advancement in the field. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of chatbot research conducted using the R bibliometrix tool and SPAR-4 protocol. The analysis includes 805 scholarly articles published between 2005 and 2021, collected from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. A conceptual, intellectual, and social structure analysis was conducted to analyse impactful authors, journals, and documents. The study reveals that adoption of chatbots in business accelerated during the pandemic period. The findings also highlight a plethora of opportunities for research in areas like chatbot design cues, user experience, chatbots in collaboration with human agents, and chatbot ethics and privacy. This study's findings provide valuable insights for practitioners, policymakers, developers and researchers to understand the current state of the chatbot research landscape and to identify promising future research directions.