Visual Mapping of Social Commerce Articles on WoS Database Between 1995 and 2023

Abstract

The goal of this research is to evaluate the social commerce. With this goal, this research aims to determine: (1) the longitudinal distribution of the articles and citations in social commerce (2) the most productive countries, journals, and affiliations in social commerce articles; (3) the most cited articles in social commerce research; and (4) the most recurrent keywords and Web of Science (WoS) categories are involved in the social commerce studies. The research conducted social commerce research papers published between 1995 and 2023 in the WoS database. We used the following search query: “social commerce*,” “social electronic commerce*,” “social e-commerce*,” “s-commerce*,” “Facebook commerce*,” “Instagram commerce*,” and “social media commerce*” The study examines 965 articles, were recorded on September 21, 2023. The data obtained were figured with the visual mapping technique. Various techniques, such as bibliographic coupling of countries, journals, and institutions of authors, co-authorship of countries, co-citation of journals, and co-occurrence of author keywords, were used in bibliometric analysis. Most of the research was in 2022, and the greatest number of citations were in 2022. The most efficient country was China. Swansea University was the most productive affiliation, with publications, citations and total links. It is found that the articles were primarily written in the field of Business, with 363 papers. There has been a substantial surge in the volume of studies on social commerce since 2013, indicating a significant growth in research interest in this field. Finally, researchers working on social commerce can understand the literature based on this current study.