Mapping the marketing of digital payment users: A bibliometric analysis of Scopus-indexed research in 2015–2025

Digital payment has become the transactional substrate of contemporary consumer markets; however, it remains unclear whether the scholarship on digital payment users has matured into marketing literature or has remained adoption literature. This study maps the intellectual and conceptual structure of this scholarship through a bibliometric analysis of 1,408 journal articles published in 547 Scopus-indexed sources between 2015 and 2025, retrieved through the Crossref open-metadata layer and screened against the Scopus source list. Performance analysis, Bradford and Lotka modelling, co-word network analysis, and Callon strategic diagramming were combined to characterize growth, concentration, collaboration, and thematic structure. Output grew at 27.6% per year and accumulated 40,025 citations, but the conceptual structure is markedly asymmetric: 47.3% of articles engage pre-adoption belief constructs, whereas only 27.4% address post-adoption relational outcomes and 23.1% address marketing-mix or strategy constructs. Segmentation appears in 0.6% of articles and brand constructs in 1.6%. Five thematic clusters were recovered, of which the acceptance-belief cluster is the most internally developed and the relationship-marketing cluster the least. Therefore, the field is theoretically narrow, methodologically monocultural, and geographically concentrated. A seven-strand research agenda is proposed to reposition digital payment scholarship as marketing research.