Bibliometric and Visualized Analysis of Research on Major E-Commerce Journals Using Citespace

The recent boom of Information Technology development has introduced a rising trend in numerous theories and practices with it. E-commerce is one of the many hot topics for both research and non-academic practice in recent years. However, e-commerce is still in the development stage; studies linking previous understanding and future research trends is needed. This study applies a bibliometric approach using CiteSpace to analyze papers across six e-commerce-focused journals from 1999 to 2016, both quantitatively and visually. Assessments on authorship, countries, institutions, keywords, reference articles, and reference journals were conducted in this study. By examining the papers after 2016 (i.e. 2017 to 2019), we have confirmed that social commerce, social media, online reviews, and word of mouth have been most frequently studied in the e-commerce field, and most research themes include current hotspots belonging to products and structures dimension defined by Zwass. Further, we have found that the mainstream research method is currently shifting from structural equation modeling to data analytics (e.g. sentiment, big data, and semantic analysis). All in all, this study not only provides a framework in the e-commerce field for new researchers but directs the center focus of research for scholars in future studies as well. Contributions and limitations are discussed at the end of this study.