Employee Legal Protection in the Digital Economy: A Bibliometric and Systematic Review

Abstract

This study examined how research on employee legal protection had developed and how far it had absorbed the governance problems created by digitally mediated work. A hybrid design combining bibliometric performance analysis, term co-occurrence mapping, and systematic review procedures was applied to 2,253 Scopus-indexed records published between 1955 and 2026 and retrieved in September 2026. Topical precision was assessed using a relevance-coded random sample of 200 records, while performance indicators were recomputed for journals-only and high-precision subsets. Output grew at an annual rate of approximately ten per cent between 1995 and 2025, yet the field remained highly fragmented: 94.3 per cent of 4,385 authors contributed only one document, author productivity followed a Lotka exponent of 4.2, and source distribution departed from Bradford’s law. Only 37 per cent of sampled records were core to the topic. Digital themes rose from below 2.5 per cent before 2015 to 23.0 per cent in 2025, while occupational safety declined in relative share. After age normalisation, digital-theme documents were cited above the field average. The findings showed a shift from physical and contractual risks toward informational and algorithmic risks, supporting compliance design for platform-based ventures. This study offered the first field-level bibliometric map of employee legal protection and quantified its digital reorientation.