A bibliometric analysis and future research agenda for online labour platforms

Abstract

Online labour platforms (OLPs) are profit-oriented companies utilising technology to connect independent contractor workers with short-term service labour needs, offering a digital marketplace for posting tasks, receiving bids, and finalising agreements across various domains such as writing, design, programming, and digital marketing. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the concurrent body of knowledge on OLPs, explaining how the specificities of this emerging form of labour are researched from various academic standpoints. The study is based on a dataset of 358 papers on OLPs published from 2013 to August 2023. The main finding of the study is that scholarly interest in OLPs is steadily growing in the observed period. However, geographical dispersion of the scientific output is not in line with the actual level of utilisation of OLPs, and scholarly interest in OLPs spans across diverse disciplines, including industrial relations and labour, management, economics, sociology, law, and computer science. The results of this paper can help better understand the dynamics of scholarly publishing on OLPs and further leverage underexploited subtopics in this field.