Bibliometric and visualized analysis of research on e-commerce journals

Since information technology is developing and evolving rapidly in the 21st century, the emergence of numerous related theories and practices are showing rising trends. E-commerce is one of subjects becomes a hot topic for both research and practice in recent years. As this subject is at the stage of development, a review on e-commerce which brings the fore and the future trend of the current researches is pressing. A bibliometric approach using CiteSpace was applied in this study to analyze the papers in 6 e-commerce focused journals from 1999 to 2016 with associated references quantitatively and visually. The assessments on authorship, countries, institutions, keywords, reference articles, and reference journals were conducted. Moreover, the future trend of e-commerce field was predicted. Therefore, this study not only provides a framework in e-commerce field for new researchers, but also directs the research hotspot for scholars in future research.