Mapping the Juridical Debate on Personal Data Ownership and Contractual Freedom: A Bibliometric Analysis of Scopus-Indexed Literature (2013–2025)

Abstract

Legal scholarship on personal data is often described through two competing logics, fundamental-rights protection and property or contract. This study maps how the Scopus-indexed literature on personal data ownership and contractual freedom developed between 2013 and 2025. It applies bibliometric analysis and keyword co-occurrence mapping in VOSviewer to a corpus of 482 documents. Three findings emerge. First, publication output increased after the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force in 2018, from 17 documents in 2017 to 32 in 2018 and 107 in 2025. The timing shows an association, and the design cannot show that the GDPR caused the increase. The documents come mostly from the United States, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe. Second, the co-occurrence map places GDPR and privacy keywords in a dense central area and property, ownership, and contract keywords in a smaller peripheral area, which indicates thematic separation between the two vocabularies. Third, the overlay map shows that keywords such as data governance, data sharing, digital assets, and ethical technology have more recent average publication years, which points to growing attention to economic value and governance in the academic discourse. Because the study analyses keywords and publication counts, it cannot show a change in legal doctrine. It offers a keyword-level map of the field, a documented screening procedure, a reading of Indonesia’s Personal Data Protection Law (Law No. 27 of 2022) against the mapped debate, and an agenda for doctrinal research.