What we know about digital hoarding, and how thin that base still is: a scoping review of 36 studies
A scoping review mapping everything published on digital hoarding since the concept was first named in 2015 finds a young, fragmented field: only 36 qualifying studies, most small, with no agreed definition or validated measurement scale.
The question: emails, photos, documents and files accumulate on devices largely without limit, and organisations increasingly worry about the productivity and security cost of employees who never delete anything. But is "digital hoarding" an actual, measured psychological phenomenon with an evidence base behind it, or a plausible-sounding label applied loosely to normal digital clutter? Natalia Bravo-Adasme, Alejandro Cataldo and Elizabeth Grandón set out to map exactly what the published literature does and does not support.
Why it matters: if organisations are going to design interventions, decluttering policies, storage limits, digital wellness programmes, around the idea that hoarding digital files is a distinct, harmful behaviour pattern, that idea needs an evidence base solid enough to justify the intervention. A scoping review is the right tool to check this, because unlike a narrower systematic review, it is built specifically to map how much evidence exists and how coherent it is, not just to summarise what the strongest studies found.
What the researchers did. The team followed Arksey and O'Malley's five-stage scoping review framework: defining research questions, searching Scopus and Web of Science for "digital possessions" and "digital hoarding" with no date restriction, removing duplicates, screening for relevance, and synthesising results into a conceptual model. The search returned 134 initial records; after removing 43 duplicates, 91 unique abstracts were screened, narrowing to 75 for closer review, and ultimately 36 articles met the inclusion criteria (English-language, complete, peer-reviewed). Consistent with scoping review methodology, the team deliberately did not assess the methodological quality of included studies, the goal was mapping the field, not weighting it by rigour. The resulting conceptual model, distributed across individual, psychological and contextual factors, was checked against three independent experts: a work and organisational psychology researcher, a cognitive science research group, and a specialist in the psychology of digital technology use.
What they found. The entire field is recent and small: the first scientific description of digital hoarding dates to a single 2015 clinical case report, and even by 2024, the field's most active year, only eight qualifying studies were published. Of the 36 included studies, 18 (50%) were quantitative, 11 (31%) qualitative, 6 (17%) conceptual, and 1 mixed-methods. Sixteen studies sampled the general adult population, five focused on specific worker populations, and eight focused on young people, five of those specifically on students. There is no single agreed definition of digital hoarding across the literature, though most definitions converge on three components: intensive acquisition of digital content, accumulation to excess, and difficulty discarding files due to emotional attachment or perceived future utility. The reviewed studies also reported a gender difference, greater difficulty discarding and greater digital disorganisation among women than men, though this finding comes from the individual studies synthesised rather than from new data collected by this review itself.
What this does NOT establish. By design, a scoping review does not evaluate whether the 36 included studies were individually well-conducted; a small, methodologically weak study and a large, rigorous one are given equal narrative weight in the synthesis, a trade-off the authors state directly rather than concealing. The field's youth means the proposed conceptual model, while checked by three outside experts for plausibility, has not been empirically tested as a whole; expert validation confirms the model is reasonable, not that it is correct. Many of the quantitative studies included draw on small or convenience samples, frequently university students, and this review, being a scoping review rather than a meta-analysis, does not and cannot report a pooled sample size or aggregate effect size across studies. The search was restricted to English-language publications, which means non-English research on this same phenomenon, plausible given how globally common digital accumulation is, was not captured and could shift the picture.
Bizarus interpretation. The most useful output of this review is not any single finding about who hoards digital files or why, it is the map of how underbuilt the field still is. A concept can feel intuitively real, and "digital hoarding" plainly captures something people recognise in their own behaviour, without yet having the kind of evidence base that supports building policy or clinical practice on top of it. Organisations designing digital-decluttering interventions, or treating employees' file-retention habits as a security or productivity risk to be managed clinically, are currently extrapolating well beyond what 36 studies, half of them quantitative and many of those small, can support. That is not a reason to dismiss the phenomenon; it is a reason to treat any confident claim about its causes, prevalence, or fix as provisional.
What remains unanswered. No validated, widely adopted measurement instrument for digital hoarding currently exists as a field standard, the review found competing, non-converging scales rather than one. Whether the proposed conceptual model actually predicts real-world outcomes, reduced productivity, increased security exposure, measurable psychological distress, in organisational settings has not been tested. And the review found essentially no longitudinal research, so whether digital hoarding tendencies are stable traits, change over a person's life, or respond to intervention is currently unknown.
Source record. Bravo-Adasme, N., Cataldo, A., and Grandón, E. Understanding digital hoarding: conceptual framework and future research based on a scoping review. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 13, Article 1046 (2026). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-07263-3. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Social Sciences (miscellaneous) category, Q1 (SCImago, 2025); also Q1 in Arts and Humanities, Business Management and Accounting, and Economics categories, Q2 in Psychology (SCImago, 2025). Open access; full text read in full by Bizarus.