Gig economy based on digital platforms is a new economic form in the digital economy, whose creation and development have brought many opportunities and challenges to enterprises and workers, and has become a hot topic of concern for all sectors of society. At present, researchers from different disciplines have conducted diverse studies on the gig economy from different research perspectives. A multi-disciplinary and multi-perspective review of these studies will help further in-depth research. In this paper, using the Structural Literature Review method, we provide a literature review and research outlook for research on the gig economy. To start with, we searched the literature related to gig economy within the SSCI/SCI/JCR Q2+ divisions and CSSCI and CSCD journals in the CNKI and WOS databases, and obtained 165 domestic articles and 575 foreign articles respectively, with the finding that domestic research had significantly lagged foreign research in terms of time. Next, through collating the academic history, we found that domestic research on gig economy had not only been adapted to the practice of digital platforms and gig economy, but had also been influenced by changes in national policies. The research on the gig economy had broadly gone through 3 stages: start-up stage, slow growth stage and rapid growth stage. Then, based on the core elements of gig economy (digital platforms, gig economy laborers and labor-using enterprises), we distilled three research perspectives of the relevant literature from the perspective of participating subject, namely government, enterprises, and laborers. At the same time, the literature was classified into five categories by means of literature codes. Further coding of research perspectives and categories showed that research based on government perspectives mainly focused on three categories in law and economics disciplines: labor law, macroeconomics and political economy, research based on the enterprise perspective mainly focused on the two categories of human resource management and strategic management in management discipline, while research based on the worker perspective mainly focused on the category of labor economics in economics discipline. Based on the above analysis, we constructed a multidisciplinary and multi-perspective framework for analyzing the literature on gig economy. Finally, we used the framework to review and provide an outlook for the research literature on gig economy. At present, gig economy is just unfolding. While driving economic development, it also brings challenges. Many issues in theory and practice are yet to be studied in depth, and new issues are likely to arise continuously. Besides, the theoretical system of gig economy research is not yet mature. Therefore, research perspectives and scope should be further expanded to include more theories from a wider range of disciplines to conduct a comprehensive and systematic study of gig economy. It is necessary to focus on interdisciplinary research and integrate multi-perspective studies to promote the formation and improvement of the theoretical system of gig economy. It is also necessary to improve and innovate research methods, especially to strengthen empirical research, so as to provide more targeted theoretical guidance for the practice of gig economy. Although the gig economy based on digital platforms has only been studied as an independent economic phenomenon since 2009, this paper provides an overview of its academic history and a multidisciplinary and multi-perspective literature review that can still provide important references and insights for the development of systematic gig economy research with multiple disciplines, perspectives and pathways.