Consumer Protection in the Use of AI in Digital Services, A Bibliometric Analysis of Consumer Protection in AI an Evidence from Scopus (2018–2026)

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting increasingly used in digital services such as recommendation systems, scoring engines, and conversational agents, thus prompting important issues concerning consumer protection. The present study maps the research domain of consumer protection in AI by means of bibliometrics on the Scopus database. Search was conducted in one database using title/abstract/keyword terms, which returned 3,307 documents (retrieval date: 27 June 2026). These documents were filtered based on titles to identify the works that explicitly focused on consumer protection in AI, yielding a core of 192 documents that were published in 2018-2026. Bibliometric analysis of the core was conducted to analyze its output display, document types, sources, citation impact, influential documents, authors, and open access. The annual growth rate of output display has been consistently high, rising from few papers before 2020 to 63 documents in 2025. Unlike other research fields, this set of consumer protection-related publications is primarily represented by journal articles (44.8%) and not conference papers (37.5%). 192 documents have been published in 155 sources by 603 authors and received a total of 1,542 citations, amounting to an average of 8 citations per paper and corpus h-index of 19, the most productive source being IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics. Most of the highly cited papers address such topics as consumer trust and privacy, fairness and explainability, ethical use of consumer data, and protection of consumers from malicious AI pricing. 23.4% of the corpus is open access. The results show that the research area is relatively new, actively developing and fragmented but thematically consistent. It provides researchers and policymakers with empirical foundation, including in countries like Indonesia.