Does Digitalization Lead to Better Transparency: Bibliometric Approach

In recent years, digitalization has been an important factor in developing political, economic, social, and cultural relations. The rapid growth of digital technologies in global and national contexts leads to significant quantitative and qualitative changes in the economic development of countries. Digitalization leads to better transparency and is also related to new damages to the national economy. Thus, this research deals with the identification of interconnectedness between digitalization and transparency. Fulfillment of this task is realized with the VOSviewer bibliometric tool based on the analysis of 320 Scopus articles on “transparency” and “digitalization” in 1999-2021. Analysis of the dynamic of publications on transparency and digitalization allows concluding that there were only several publications a year in 1999-2009. In 2010-2018 the number of relevant publications demonstrated considerable growth, while in 2019-2021, there was a boost of scientific interest to the cohesion between transparency and digitalization. The bibliometric analysis allows pointing out that there is a strong relationship between transparency and digitalization. Basically, under network analysis, six clusters of research were identified, which focused on the implementation of digital technologies in business, logistics, public governance, the financial sphere, information management, and personal privacy. Moreover, considering visualization results, it might be concluded that more recent publications on transparency and digitalization are focused on the research of blockchain technologies, supply technologies, and artificial intelligence. The density visualization showed that the most relevant keywords in publications on transparency and digitalization are digitalization, blockchain, and industry 4.0. These bibliometric results might create a theoretical background on clarification of scale up to which development of digital sphere does not damage national security.