Mapping the intellectual structure of electronic commerce research: 1997-2006

The past decades have seen extensive research on electronic commerce (e-commerce). The broad-based organisational and technological development in e-commerce research requires categorisation to be understood in its entirety. To profile the intellectual structure of e-commerce research, this study uses bibliometric and social network analysis techniques to investigate the intellectual pillars of the e-commerce literature. This study analyses 30,509 citations of over 1600 papers on e-commerce published between 1997 and 2006, resulting in an intellectual structure of e-commerce studies. The mapping of ten years of e-commerce studies presents a solid foundation for knowledge management in e-commerce area and helps identify the invisible knowledge network that traces the evolution of e-commerce research.