Research on the digital divide has been growing exponentially in recent years. This has been particularly evident from 2020 onwards, following digital governance. This article offers an overview of the development of academic literature with regard to the intellectual structure of digital divide. By applying a mixed method of both qualitative and quantitative methodology to analyze results from different bibliometric analyses, After nearly 30 years of development, digital divide has emerged as an important domain, attracting the attention of more scholars. The purpose of this study was to present a holistic picture of relevant research on digital divide over time and systematically articulate a knowledge map in this domain. On the basis of the scientific literature on digital divide from 2000 to 2023 collected from the Scopus database, we adopted the bibliometric method to present initial statistics, co-citation analysis, hotspot analysis, and research frontier analysis. The findings of this study contribute to the development of the digital divide research domain in at least three important ways: (1) identifying the overall development trend and key academic contributions in the domain; (2) mapping the intellectual structure of the digital divide domain and research ‘hotspots’; and (3) tracking the evolution of the digital divide domain and research frontiers.