The Development of Social Commerce Research: A Main Path Analysis of the Literature

Abstract

Recent studies have highlighted that social commerce has become a new type of electronic commerce since consumers' shopping behavior is heavily influenced by social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), such as reading comments and feedback on products. It is important to note that the development of social commerce has caught the attention of business practitioners; moreover, it is also essential for researchers to probe into the existing research on the rapid growth of social commerce. As such, the aim of our research review is to identify the core research themes and trends in social commerce. To gain deep insights from the academic research, we present a network-based citation analysis, that is, a main path analysis, to analyze the knowledge dissemination within the social commerce literature. To construct a holistic review of the social commerce research, in this study, we performed multi-keyword queries to search for relevant articles in two major sources of high quality academic journals, namely the Sciences Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). The timespan covers original papers and the most up-to-date research. Accordingly, a total of 319 journal articles with 3,753 citations were obtained and used for the main path analysis. Based on the algorithm of the search path link count, the traversal count of knowledge flow within the social commerce research network was calculated. In addition, the result of the top 10 critical main paths (key-routes) was mapped in a directed network graph. This is the very first attempt to profile the most critical developmental trajectories of social commerce research. The pilot results can serve as a research-based platform for scholarly discussion.