REGULATING CREATIVITY: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF LAW AND THE CREATIVE INDUSTRY (2016–2025)

Abstract

This research departs from the phenomenon of the increasing role of the creative industry in the global economy, which has not yet been fully matched by the development of cohesive and integrated legal studies, thus creating the need to map the knowledge structure in the field of Creative Industry and Law. Using a bibliometric approach thru the bibliographic coupling method, this research analyzes 483 scientific documents published in the period 2021–2025, processed using VOSviewer and Bibliometrix tools to identify patterns of intellectual connections between documents, publication sources, authors, organizations, and countries. The analysis results show that the study of law and the creative industry is still developing fragmentarily, characterized by limited document interconnections and centered around a few key works, so the academic discourse has not yet been integrated into a well-established conceptual framework. At the level of sources and authors, the dominance of intellectual property law journals and the presence of certain academic actors as network nodes indicate that the discourse is still constructed from a protective-economic perspective, while the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of creativity have not been articulated in a balanced manner. At the global level, inter-country networks exhibit an asymmetric transnational pattern, where certain countries function as conceptual reference centers, while others tend to reproduce established frameworks, potentially perpetuating epistemic imbalances in the development of creative industry law. These findings affirm that law in the context of the creative industry is still more reactive than formative, as it primarily serves as a regulatory instrument for established practices, rather than as a conceptual framework that shapes the direction of creativity transformation. Methodologically and theoretically, this research demonstrates that bibliometric analysis not only serves as a tool for mapping literature but also as a medium for critiquing the structure of knowledge production, while simultaneously opening up space for the development of a more dialogic and contextual interdisciplinary paradigm in building creative industry law in the knowledge-based economy era.