Using Bibliometric Analysis to Explore Research Trend of Electronic Word-of-Mouth from 1999 to 2011

Abstract

eWOMs can have on the consumers’ decision-making process. The eWOM research is blooming for the past few years and attracts the sight from both academics and practice. This study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of recent trends of eWOM research. To accomplish this goal, this study used bibliometric techniques and literature review to the eWOM articles which lised in Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) during the 12-year period of 1999–2011. Bibliometric analysis is a research technique using quantitative and statistical analyses to describe distribution patterns of research articles with a given topic and a given time period [12, 13]. This paper makes use of bibliometric approaches to reveal research trend of eWOM and to serve as a roadmap of eWOM both academics and practitioners. The purposes of this study are to: 1) Analyze distribution of eWOM articles, such as publication years, countries of authors, published journals, and citation times. 2) Analyze the citation and co-citation relations among eWOM articles. This paper is structured in four sections. The first section provides a brief introduction for this study. Then, the second section introduces bibliometric techniques that used in this study. Next, this study explains the analysis results. Finally, we conclude the article with a discussion of limitations and implications for future research.