Electronic Commerce Research Profiles: Comparing E-Commerce and Information Systems Journals

The rapid diffusion of information and mobile technologies has revolutionized the way we do business and how we conduct our daily lives. Electronic commerce (e-commerce or EC) has had an enormous impact on business practices and has become a new area of study for researchers in related fields. Thousands of papers on this subject have been published in the past two decades, most of which have been published in e-commerce (EC) journals. However, many such papers have been published in information systems (IS) journals. Information systems have become the core discipline that drives e-commerce research. The purpose of this research is to report on the profiles of e-commerce papers published in major EC and IS journals, and to determine whether papers that have appeared in EC journals differ from those published in IS journals. We surveyed EC papers published in ten major journals and conducted a bibliometric analysis. Our findings indicate that (1) more EC papers are published in EC journals, but papers published in IS journals are cited more often; (2) collectively, authors in the U.S. are the most prolific, followed by those in China and Taiwan; (3) more theories were used in recent papers than in earlier ones, and the TAM has been the most popular model; (4) B2C and consumer behavior have been the most popular subject areas for EC research; and (5) the core knowledge measured by the co-citation network was provided by the same group of authors in EC and IS journal publications