E-commerce Research in the Past Decade: A Bibliometric Analysis

E-commerce has emerged as a key force driving global economic prosperity, profoundly transforming people’s consumption patterns and lifestyle habits. It not only exerts extensive positive impacts in creating employment opportunities, optimizing economic structures, promoting fairness and justice, protecting the ecological environment, and deepening cultural exchanges, but also carries profound social significance. This study aims to objectively and systematically describe the current status and development trends of e-commerce research, fill the research gaps in existing literature, and provide new perspectives for future research. Regarding the Web of Science database as the retrieval platform, this paper searched for relevant research literature published between 2014 and 2023 using “e-commerce,” “electronic commerce,” “electronic business,” and “internet commerce” as subject terms. The information visualization software CiteSpace was employed to draw knowledge maps of e-commerce research and conduct visual literature analysis. As has been found in this study, the overall number of published literatures related to e-commerce showed an upward trend: with China being the country with the highest number of publications, the Chinese Academy of Sciences being the most productive institution, and George Q. Huang being the author with the highest number of citations. Through keyword co-occurrence analysis, it was determined that e-commerce research primarily focuses on seven aspects: recommendation systems, word-of-mouth communication, system dynamics, information technology, modeling methods, digital marketing, and supply chain management. Additionally, analysis of the burst literature revealed that e-commerce research has undergone three distinct stages of development trends over the past decade. This study presents the first systematic review and quantitative analysis of a large body of academic literature in the field of e-commerce over the past decade. It reveals the current state of research, developmental trends, and the underlying knowledge structure, providing valuable insights and references for both academia and industry practitioners.