Digital Platform Research: Everywhere and Nowhere

Omnichannel and emerging tech fade, while social media remains the exception.

We analysed 225 special issue calls for papers (CFPs) from marketing journals published between 2022 and 2025. CFPs are useful because they are forward-looking editorial signals. They indicate what editors and guest editors believe is missing or insufficiently developed, rather than summarising what is already common in published work.

In this analysis, digital platforms refers to the platforms, channels, and media environments through which marketing is conducted. We capture this through three sub-themes: social media and influencer marketing, digital channels and omnichannel integration (including e-commerce and B2B platforms), and emerging platforms and technologies such as AR/VR, metaverse-related applications, and Web3 topics. This allows to keep focus on platform environments as marketing contexts, not on platform business models or platform economics.

The pattern that stood out 📌

Platform topics appear in almost 9 out of 10 CFPs in our dataset. However, when we assessed whether platforms were framed as the primary research gap motivating the special issue, platforms ranked 7th out of 8 topic areas. More importantly, that centrality is declining faster than any other topic category.

Across 2022 to 2025, platform centrality fell by 38%, despite platforms remaining widely referenced as contextual framing.

Figure 1. The Disappearing Act

A careful interpretation is that many editors increasingly treat platforms as a baseline research context rather than an open frontier requiring dedicated special issues. Platforms still matter, but they are less often positioned as the main unresolved problem.

Three trajectories inside one umbrella

The aggregate decline hides three very different trajectories inside the platform umbrella.

1. Emerging platforms and technologies: the cooling curve. In 2022, 40% of CFPs explicitly flagged emerging technologies, for example metaverse, AR/VR, blockchain, NFTs, as gaps needing research attention. By 2025, this fell to 23%, a 42% decline. This pattern is consistent with a rapid early surge in editorial attention, followed by a perception that the first-wave questions were addressed sufficiently for special-issue purposes.

   
   

2. Omnichannel and integrated digital channels: topic maturity. Omnichannel integration is now rarely framed as a gap requiring special-issue attention. Only 2.7% of calls mention it, with four calls total by 2025. This does not imply omnichannel is unimportant. It signals that editors are less likely to view it as an agenda-setting gap relative to other emerging issues.

   
   

3. Social media and influencer marketing: the exception. Against the overall decline, social media and influencer marketing increased strongly as an editor-defined gap, from 18% of calls in 2022 to 32% in 2025, a 78% increase. Higher-ranked journals were also substantially more likely to call for social media research than lower-tier outlets (32% versus 18%).

Figure 2. The Great Platform Divergence

The key point is not that platforms are disappearing. It is that the unresolved platform agenda has increasingly concentrated around social media, while omnichannel and emerging-tech themes are less frequently framed as editor-defined gaps.

Why social media remains persistently under-resolved

Given the volume of existing publications, the continued rise in social media commissioning priorities is notable. Three non-exclusive explanations fit the way gaps are framed in CFPs.

First, the empirical object changes faster than the literature stabilises. Platform governance, algorithms, creator monetisation, content formats, and commerce features shift rapidly. That volatility repeatedly re-opens questions and reduces the shelf-life of empirical findings.

Second, the theoretical agenda expands rather than converges. Mechanisms such as algorithmic curation, network effects, parasocial relationships, and virality can generate cumulative knowledge, but they also produce new problem sets rather than closure.

Third, social media is structurally entangled with wider societal and regulatory concerns. Because social platforms intersect with misinformation, polarisation, wellbeing, and governance, marketing questions increasingly sit alongside interdisciplinary debates. This increases perceived significance and sustains editorial demand for further work, especially work that clarifies mechanisms and boundary conditions.

The editorial team effect 🌍

A second pattern concerns who frames platform-related gaps as important. In our dataset, platform emphasis is higher when special issues are led by editorial teams based largely in the same country as the journal’s publisher, and lower when editorial teams are more internationally composed. Domestic-led special issues place 29% more emphasis on platform topics than internationally edited special issues.

This reversal matters because, across many other topics, internationally composed teams tend to signal broader or more expansive gaps. For platforms, the opposite pattern suggests that perceived platform gaps are often shaped by local market ecosystems. Platform environments differ across countries in dominant services, infrastructures, and norms of use. Editors embedded in a single market may be more sensitive to the platform and channel questions that remain unresolved in that specific context, whereas internationally composed teams may gravitate toward cross-context frontiers.

Consistent with that interpretation, emerging platform technologies appear at more than double the rate in internationally edited special issues, compared to domestic-led teams. These themes are more likely to be positioned as universal, boundary-pushing questions rather than market-specific platform dynamics.

Figure 2. The Editorial Team Effect

What this signals about the next 2 to 3 years of published research

Because special issues translate into submissions and publication with a time lag, CFPs provide a forward-looking signal of what is likely to appear in leading journals over the next 2 to 3 years. In our dataset, the platform-related pipeline is narrowing rather than expanding. Editorial attention is increasingly concentrated in social media and influencer marketing, while digital channels and omnichannel is rarely framed as an open gap and emerging platforms and technologies shows a marked decline in gap emphasis over 2022 to 2025. For readers using this report to gauge where demand is building, the implication is that “platforms” are less often treated as the main unresolved problem in marketing science. Demand is strongest when platform work is positioned around specific unsettled mechanisms and boundary conditions, especially in social media contexts, rather than framed as broad platform description. In short, platforms remain widely referenced across CFPs, but they are increasingly treated as context, with social media as the persistent exception.

Edited by Dan Muravsky, PhD, SFHEA,

Senior lecturer in marketing at the University of the West of Scotland

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This analysis is part of an ongoing "ILOVE marketing" Marketingaroo project mapping editorial gap signals and emerging priorities in marketing scholarship using special issue CFPs (2022 to 2025).