NFT Research Matures: Six Themes Emerge from 190 Peer-Reviewed Studies

A sweeping hybrid review of 190 peer-reviewed articles on non-fungible tokens has mapped how scholarship on the blockchain-based assets has evolved since 2022, tracing a field that began with questions about smart contracts and pricing and has since spread into law, consumer psychology, healthcare traceability, and metaverse ecosystems. The analysis, published as an open-access review in the journal Digital Economy and Sustainable Development, combines bibliometric mapping with systematic thematic classification, and it concludes that NFT research now clusters into six distinct domains, with market behavior, legal ambiguity, and technological infrastructure dominating the conversation.

The authors, Rangin Lahiri, Saikat Chakrabarti, and Subrata Saha, assembled their corpus from Scopus in January 2025, searching titles, abstracts, and keywords for NFT-related terms and restricting inclusion to English-language articles and reviews published from 2022 onward. Additional filters required at least two citations and at least three NFT mentions in the abstract, yielding a final dataset of 190 articles spread across 119 journals, an average of just 1.6 articles per outlet. That dispersion, the authors argue, underscores how interdisciplinary the field has become, drawing in economics, computer science, finance, and media studies. Finance Research Letters led all venues with 16 articles, or 8.42 percent of the dataset, followed by IEEE Access with 13, while Scientific Reports, International Review of Financial Analysis, and Mathematics each contributed four.

To organize this literature, the team processed each article’s title, abstract, and keywords through a natural language pipeline, converting the text into numerical vectors using term frequency-inverse document frequency, a technique that emphasizes distinctive words while downplaying common ones. They then applied non-negative matrix factorization, an unsupervised algorithm that extracts latent semantic topics, fixing the number of topics at six. Manual review of the resulting assignments produced the final taxonomy: User and Market Dynamics accounts for 26.32 percent of the literature, Legal and Ethical Considerations for 17.89 percent, Blockchain and NFT Technology for 17.37 percent, Applications and Use Cases for 14.74 percent, Challenges and Issues for 12.63 percent, and Digital Transformation and Innovation for 11.05 percent. The three largest clusters together comprise more than 61 percent of the corpus, a concentration the authors interpret as evidence that NFT scholarship remains anchored in speculative behavior, asset pricing, technical architecture, and regulatory complexity.

Keyword co-occurrence networks built with the visualization tool VOSviewer reinforced that picture. The term “token” emerged as the brightest, densest hub in a heat-map of research attention, with “blockchain” and “technology” forming secondary high-density zones. Financial vocabulary such as “price,” “market,” and “investor” showed moderate to high density, while terms like “artist,” “policy,” “consumer,” and “investment” sat in low-density blue zones, signaling underexplored territory. A temporal overlay of the same networks revealed a clear progression: the early period from 2022 into early 2023 was dominated by technology, implementation, bitcoin, ethereum, volatility, and smart contracts; the middle period shifted toward user adoption, authentication, and content creation; and the most recent period, though underrepresented because of publication lags, appears oriented toward specialized applications, consumer use cases, and regulatory considerations.

The review situates this scholarly evolution against a turbulent market backdrop. NFT trading exploded between 2020 and 2022, propelled by cryptocurrency adoption, celebrity endorsements, and speculative fervor; the global market crossed $40 billion by the end of 2021, and OpenSea alone recorded an all-time high of $3.7 billion in trading volume in January 2022. Headline sales included Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” auctioned for $69 million at Christie’s in 2021, and Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, which fetched $2.9 million. The boom then reversed sharply: a prolonged downturn in 2022 and 2023, triggered by broader cryptocurrency declines, market saturation, and the FTX collapse, left more than 95 percent of NFTs created during the boom deemed to be of far less value by 2023, according to industry analysis the review cites. Signs of recovery appeared in 2024, with weekly sales volumes surging to $224.41 million by December of that year.

Within the financial research stream, the review highlights Dowling’s benchmark studies on NFT pricing, which argue that artificial scarcity combined with speculative bubbles produces erratic price behavior, and that although NFT and cryptocurrency markets co-move at times, a shock to one generally does not spill over to the other, supporting the treatment of NFTs as a distinct asset class. Subsequent work has explored volatility spillovers driven by news attention, wavelet coherence analysis of NFT correlations with major asset classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, hedging properties assessed with non-linear autoregressive models, and asymmetric multifractality in returns. Machine learning has entered the field as well, with ensemble methods and explainable AI applied to price forecasting, and network science deployed to detect market manipulation such as wash trading, in which self-transactions artificially inflate prices.

Beyond markets, the review documents a striking expansion of NFT applications into industrial and institutional settings. Cited studies include blockchain-enabled traceability systems for medical devices, in which NFTs function as digital twins capturing regulatory approvals and lifecycle events to combat counterfeiting; an NFT-enabled passport for trading construction waste; frameworks for patent management; and luxury-goods authentication, with major brands investing in virtual experiences and metaverse land. In creative industries, musicians have tokenized albums for automated royalty distribution, and NFT ecosystems have enabled creators to receive 5 to 10 percent royalties on secondary-market resales. Virtual land markets in platforms such as Decentraland and The Sandbox, where parcels have sold for millions of dollars, are projected in one cited analysis to grow from $1.1 billion in 2025 to $20.9 billion by 2035, a 34.5 percent compound annual growth rate.

The review is equally explicit about what the literature has neglected. Legal scholarship has concentrated on copyright and intellectual property while broader questions of policy design, cross-jurisdictional ownership frameworks, and taxation across the NFT lifecycle remain in the shadows. Few articles address decentralized storage, cross-chain interoperability, or greener consensus models, despite early research linking proof-of-work minting to carbon emissions and associated environmental harms. Socioeconomic inclusion, digital equity, and accessibility rarely appear as foregrounded concerns, even as gas fees and technical literacy gaps may bar smaller creators from participation. Trust, the authors note, is frequently reduced to blockchain mechanics when deeper questions about user perception, fraud mitigation, and reputation systems remain scarce, a pointed observation given documented fraud episodes such as the 2022 Baller Ape Club rug pull, in which developers absconded with $2.6 million of investor funds.

The authors also flag a structural weakness: research tends to stay within disciplinary silos, with legal studies ignoring behavioral insight and market analyses overlooking technical design, even though the most urgent questions live at those intersections. Their proposed agenda calls for transdisciplinary methodologies combining financial econometrics with behavioral psychology, legal analysis with smart contract design, and computational approaches with qualitative investigation, alongside longitudinal studies of NFT certification in pharmaceuticals, medical credentialing, and ethical sourcing. Citation patterns reinforce the field’s momentum: 2022 publications account for 30 of the top 50 most cited works and average 55.9 citations per article, compared with 15.1 for 2023 and 7.8 for 2024, a pattern reflecting both cumulative citation dynamics and sustained scholarly attention. As a bibliometric snapshot rather than an evaluation of NFT technology itself, the review’s contribution lies in its map, showing a research landscape consolidating around a market-technology-legal triangle while its applied and inclusive frontiers remain, by the authors’ own accounting, comparatively underdeveloped.

Subject of Research: A bibliometric and systematic meta-analysis of peer-reviewed non-fungible token research published from 2022 onward

Article Title: Multidisciplinary perspectives on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs): a comprehensive meta-analysis

Article References: Lahiri, R., Chakrabarti, S., & Saha, S. (2026). Multidisciplinary perspectives on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs): a comprehensive meta-analysis. Digital Economy and Sustainable Development, 4(1), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44265-026-00078-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44265-026-00078-9

Keywords: NFTs, blockchain, bibliometrics, meta-analysis, digital assets, market dynamics, regulation, metaverse, smart contracts, thematic clustering, trust, sustainability