Metaverse ecosystem: A bibliometric analysis

The rapid development of digital technologies has positioned the Metaverse, defined as a new digital ecosystem where virtual and physical realities merge, as a significant research area in both academic literature and the business world. Formed through the combination of technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, the Metaverse has become the focus of numerous theoretical and applied studies across different disciplines. Based on this, it is considered useful to systematically examine the current state of research on the Metaverse. This study therefore aims to present an overall picture of postgraduate academic research on the Metaverse conducted in Türkiye. For this purpose, a bibliometric analysis was carried out on 149 postgraduate theses listed in the Council of Higher Education Thesis Center (YÖK Tez Merkezi), published between 1 October 2022 and 30 October 2025, and containing the term "Metaverse" in their titles. The findings of the study indicate that the concept of the Metaverse has attracted substantial academic interest in a short period of time and has rapidly developed as a field of research. The results show that postgraduate theses on the Metaverse are predominantly concentrated in the fields of business, education, sociology, economics, and law, while remaining relatively limited in technical disciplines such as engineering and information technologies. Most studies focus on conceptual frameworks, model proposals, and potential applications; however, the number of experimental or measurement-evaluation-oriented studies is found to be limited. The study is expected to make academic publications on the Metaverse more visible in terms of their disciplinary distribution, methodological choices, and thematic orientations, thereby contributing to the identification of gaps in the existing literature. Keywords: Metaverse, Bibliometric Analysis, Digital Ecosystem, Scientific Mapping, Research Trends