Editorial: Mapping the Structure of International Research Collaboration Network and Knowledge Domains on Electronic Commerce in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research

Abstract

IntroductionE-commerce has been an academic research discipline and a domain of practice since the 1990s, when the use of internet for commercial purposes started. This novel field of research required new venues to disseminate and present research ideas that could capture e-commerce knowledge from academia and industry. The Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research (JTAER) came to provide a space for this purpose in 2006 and since that time it has been a channel where researchers could publish their work. In the meantime, research topics on e-commerce have been evolving to reflect technological advancements and changes in society. These changes have impacted the patterns of collaboration among researchers around the world and the structure of knowledge-core subjects, concepts and phenomena- on e-commerce.This editorial explores the research published in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research (JTAER) from 2007 (i.e., since JTAER was indexed in Scopus) to 2014, providing a systematic review of the international collaboration patterns and the knowledge areas addressed by the journal. The objectives pursued by this study are:1. Illustrate the structure of the international collaboration network on e-commerce using the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research (JTAER)2. Identify the major domains of knowledge published in this journal3. Depict international collaboration in these major domains of knowledgeTo achieve these objectives, 175 research documents, published in JTAER between 2007 and 2014, in the category articles are analyzed. International collaboration among researchers in this journal is mapped using social network analysis techniques to identify the countries that collaborate and the ones that serve as a bridge for communication with other countries. Knowledge areas in the articles published in JTAER are mapped in accordance to the most relevant framework that structured the domains and themes in e-commerce research today [20].International Collaboration and Electronic Commerce ResearchResearch on international academic collaboration has witnessed a sustained increase interest from the worldwide scientific community in recent years [3], [7], [8], [12], [13], [14], [21], [22], [23], [24]. Research results suggest that the increase of international collaboration has fostered the citation impact of articles. For example, a research study reports that articles by authors from two different countries receive on average about 50% more citations than articles written by authors from a single country [6]. Another study reports that for science in general, articles published in international collaboration are cited twice as much as those published by means of the collaboration among authors coming from one country [10]. There is strong evidence that internationally co-authored publications have a higher impact than domestic ones [18]. A recent study found that Latin American papers on management published through international collaboration have 1.59 times more impact than those published through only domestic collaboration [15]. A different study researched the collaboration patterns and their relationships to the impact of the documents published in the field of management [24]. The authors analyze the collaboration networks of Chinese scholars and state that the accumulated number of Chinese authors and the accumulated number of articles published by Chinese authors increase by exponential form. Studies on the conformation and evolution of collaboration networks of a particular discipline through a journal are scarce. We are not aware of any previous study on the patterns of international collaboration research networks in e-commerce literature.Knowledge Domains in Electronic Commerce ResearchThe Internet was the main driving force behind the development of electronic commerce. From its beginning researchers have presented different frameworks to classify electronic commerce research and its development. …