Mapping the digital transformation of social work: a bibliometric analysis of trends, challenges, and future directions (2000–2024)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The digital transformation of social work has accelerated in recent years as technological innovation and global crises reshape professional practice and education. However, systematic analyses of this evolution remain limited. This bibliometric study examines 969 publications from 2000 to 2024 using Bibliometrix, VOSviewer, and CiteSpace to map the intellectual structure and thematic development of digital social work. The results reveal three developmental phases, moving from early exploration to pandemic-driven expansion and recent consolidation characterised by greater specialisation and ethical reflection. Research activity is concentrated in Anglophone countries, particularly the United States, England, and Canada, where collaboration networks remain regionally bounded. Leading scholars such as F. Mishna and J. Manthorpe, together with core journals including the British Journal of Social Work and the Journal of Social Work Education, have shaped the field’s intellectual foundation. Five major themes emerge across the literature: digital interventions in health and crisis response, digital inclusion and vulnerability, workforce well-being, ethical governance in technology mediated practice, and digital pedagogy. The study highlights both the adaptability of social work to technological change and the need for more inclusive, cross regional, and policy-oriented research to advance equitable digital transformation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.182 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".