What Research Tells Us about Digital Video Genres: A Scoping Review
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Abstract
Digital transformation has fundamentally reshaped traditional discourse, contributing to the emergence of video-mediated genres that integrate verbal, visual, and audio elements. Although genre analysis has traditionally focused on written texts, research on digital video genres has grown in recent years; however, it remains dispersed across platforms, contexts and analytical approaches. To address this fragmentation, we conducted a scoping review based on Arksey and O’ Malley’s five-stage methodological framework and the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. Systematic searches of Scopus and Google Scholar covering 2018–2025 identified 28 eligible primary studies. The review identified five major video genre clusters: academic, public talks, commercial and marketing, socio-cultural, and professional/workplace. YouTube was the predominant platform across these studies, while academic video genres were the most represented, reflecting the expanding role of video in scholarly communication and teaching in higher education. Swales’s and Bhatia’s move-based genre analysis frameworks were the most frequently employed, often alongside multimodal considerations of the genre. In contrast, Critical Genre Analysis remains underrepresented, with only two of the 28 studies addressing power, ideology, and interdiscursivity in digital video genres. Overall, this review highlights key trends in genre hybridisation, platform-sensitive adaptation, and methodological preferences, offering a systematic scoping overview of how genre analysis has been applied to digital video genres and outlining directions for future research in this area.
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