A Bibliometric Review of Information Systems Research During 1975-2018

Abstract

Information Systems (IS) scholars attempted to explore the intellectual structure of the IS discipline from previous literature. However, the corpus data, analytical method, and sample size are significantly different among these review studies, which lead to rather mixed results. In this bibliometric review, the authors portray and visualize the panorama of the evolutionary process of IS research with two powerful bibliometric tools, including both CiteSpace and VOSviewer. Specifically, based on a series of bibliometric algorithms (e.g., SCI-Map and referene-NLP), the authors analyze 80,147 primary articles and 1,325,376 secondary articles in the IS domain to examine its 1) intellectual output mode, 2) knowledge bases, and 3) the popular and promising topics in the future from the evolutionary and clustering perspectives. By doing so, the authors provide a comprehensive navigation for the IS studies and set up an agenda for future research.