Abstract

E-business celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2018. In the past quarter-century, e-business has played an increasingly important role in both academic and professional communities. As of October 2018, the Google Scholar (GS) database recognized over 35 thousand publications whose titles include at least one e-business term such as "electronic commerce." Since the turn of the century, thousands of e-business articles have been published annually. That is being said, we have a sufficient period and sample size to conduct citation analyses in e-business research. Citation analysis can serve multiple goals such as identifying the most influential publications and exploring core and emerging knowledge in a research area. This study conducted a citation analysis of e-business adoption literature, which is an important research area in e-business. We seek to answer the three questions: 1) where were the e-business-adoption articles published, 2) how the citations of for all e-business-adoption articles were distributed, and 3) what were the main methods, units of analysis, and topics of the e-business-adoption articles. This study searched e-business-adoption articles published between 2006 and 2011 via GS using a 'keyword' approach. In total, we found 1,729 articles including at least one e-business-related term (e.g., electronic business) and one adoption-related term (e.g., acceptance) in their title. After further examining their abstracts and cleansing some irrelevant and duplicated records, 1,406 articles remained for the citation analysis. We recorded each article's title, publication outlet, publication year, topic, methods, unit of analysis, and GS citations each year. On average, 234 articles were published each year and about 45%, 27%, and 14% were published as journal articles, conference proceedings, and dissertations, respectively. The average number of accumulated citations of the 1,406 articles increased from 8.04 in 2011 to 36.25 in 2017, with a CAGR of 28.5%, indicating that the e-business-adoption literature received sufficient attention in academia. However, we found a long-tail distribution with a small portion of highly cited articles accounting for a significant portion of all citations. The top 5% (70) highly-cited articles contributed to 47-54% of the total citations across six years. Using the method suggested by Durden and Ellis (1993), we identified the most influential articles in each year from 2011 to 2017. Furthermore, we find that a majority of articles used quantitative approaches, with survey as the most common method. E-business adoption has been studied at various units of analysis, among which individual consumers and organizations are the two most common ones. Those studies have examined various topics in e-business: for individual consumers, the top three topics are online banking, shopping, and education, while the most common topic at the organizational level is organizations e-business systems. This study performs the state-of-the-art citation analysis for e-business-adoption research and provides an overview of citations scores in this field. It contributes to educators by helping them organize coverage of e-business adoption in course plans and to researchers by providing a platform for supporting the identification of relevant literature, motivating future citation analysis, seeing future research needs, and positioning future investigations.

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