1. Introduction
Electronic marketing (eM) is a mechanism to convey knowledge about a product by the medium of the internet [
1]. Electronic marketing remains a developing system which provides such a terrace, which made it possible to run all types of electronic promotions through internet-oriented technologies [
2]. Brodie et al. [
3] declared e-marketing an origin of communication between customers and organizations by using communication technologies. In a previous research study [
4], the model consisted of distinctive marketing observations such as interaction marketing, database marketing, transaction marketing, and network marketing. After quite some time, Coviello et al. [
4] also branded a novel element of promotion actions that is recognized as e-marketing. Afterward, the investigators concentrated on the research of electronic marketing in diverse frameworks and magnitudes [
5].
In the last couple of years, the research on electronic and digital marketing has seen immense growth [
6,
7]. Several researchers have conducted empirical examinations on different internet-based promotional mediums, including mobile marketing [
8] network marketing [
3], intranet marketing [
9], digital marketing [
10], and internet marketing [
11]. Studies on electronic marketing, especially with consideration of bibliometric analysis, are missing in the literature, which is the unique contribution of this article. Therefore, to effectively understand and steer any academic field such as electronic marketing, practitioners and academicians must be aware of the current trends and trajectories of any field.
The field of studies concerned with the quantitative investigation of the published literature is called bibliometrics [
12,
13]. Bibliometric studies are now widely used in a wide range of academic disciplines, including management, economics, accounting, consumers, promotions, and entrepreneurship. Previous research has looked at a number of subjects, such as the publishing patterns in a particular journal [
14], the most cited papers [
15], leading authors [
16,
17], journals [
18], and universities [
19]. However, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first that attempts to conduct a bibliometric analysis for electronic marketing research since the very first publication was recorded in the Scopus database.
The main contribution of this study is that it provides a broad overview of the leading countries, universities, journals, and authors, as well as the most cited papers and future research agendas for electronic marketing research. It is imperative for journal editors to know the places where growth is possible for the discipline. Potential scholars may also gain value from this investigation because they may get an overall picture of areas that are strongly investigated so they can find satisfactory places to follow a graduate program. Policymakers may be concerned with this method in the direction of recognizing the foremost countries in electronic marketing studies. The research can also offer global companies with a more profound understanding of the best environments for the directive of installing their R&D centers.
We took a similar approach to [
20] in this report, but with an emphasis on e-marketing research, which is a relatively new subject compared with innovation and has received far less attention from academic researchers in terms of bibliometric review. The scope of this current study is wider, and it aims at identifying the most active countries, universities, journals, and writers of electronic marketing, taking into account many bibliometric indicators as follows.
First, this report offers a trend of publications and references between 2000 and 2019. Second, a global perspective analyzes the nations with certain numbers of articles and citations. Third, the most productive institutions of higher education are registered. Fourth, the journals are recognized. Fifth, the most productive authors are recognized based on the number of publications and references in relation to electronic marketing investigation. The research involved bibliometric connection and co-citation examination to understand how these journals, countries, and authors were connected. Finally, to identify the most common keywords occurring in electronic marketing, the study conducted co-occurrence analysis of the keywords. In addition, based on the analyses of the statistics acquired, we also propose a certain forthcoming investigation schedule for electronic marketing investigation.
2. Methods
2.1. Brief Overview of the Bibliometric Technique
The study of previous research is critical to the advancement of any academic area [
21,
22]. Certain techniques, such as qualitative literature reviews and quantitative literature reviews, can be used to synthesize the previous literature. Meta research and science mapping are examples of quantitative analysis that provide an objective view of the existing literature. Science mapping uses bibliometric techniques to examine how various areas, disciplines, individual articles, and authors are connected to one another. It gives the results a spatial presentation in the form of maps. The primary goal of science mapping or bibliometric analysis is to depict the intellectual framework of a research field using various factors, such as papers, writers, journals, terms, and countries. In comparison with narrative literature reviews, this method is more objective and comprehensive. Quantitative review of the literature is helpful in synthesizing the literature because it gives readers a more objective, unbiased perspective.
The bibliometric technique has gained a lot of interest from researchers in the current era due to the proliferation of computerization and easily accessible bibliographic data from databases such as the Web of Science and Scopus databases. Recently, bibliometric approaches have been used to perform bibliometric analyses of journals [
23,
24,
25], disciplines [
26,
27], institutes, and countries [
28].
We used two main aspects of bibliometric research in this review.
Performance and science mapping are two aspects of bibliographic data that are used in bibliometric methods. Science mapping visualizes the field’s structure and dynamics, while performance analysis measures the productivity and effect in terms of the number of publications and citations. We attempted to include the following analysis in order to achieve the aim of our research:
Citation and co-citation analysis;
Bibliographical coupling;
Keyword co-occurrence analysis.
Citation data are used in citation, co-citation, and bibliographic coupling to assess impact and similarity. Citation analysis helps to determine the journal’s, paper’s, or author’s effect and influence, while co-citation analysis is a measure of correlation that arises when two documents receive citations from a third document. When two documents are co-cited, it is assumed that their material is identical. When two separate documents quote the third document in their reference lists, this is known as bibliographic coupling. The number of common sources between two published documents is used by BC to determine the degree of similarity. The greater the number of mutual references, the greater the resemblance.
2.2. Database
The electronic marketing research publications were found using the Scopus database. One of the most comprehensive peer-reviewed research repositories in the social sciences is Scopus. For analytical and quantitative analysis, the repository is often used and acknowledged (Donthu et al., 2020). We used the following search query: “((TITLE-ABS-KEY (“Electronic Marketing”) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY(“e-marketing”)) AND PUBYEAR > 1999 AND PUBYEAR < 2020)”. Only “articles”, conference papers, book chapters, and review documents were chosen, whereas the source type was limited to journals, books, conference proceedings, and book series. It is pertinent to mention that the documents were limited to the fields of business, management, and accounting.
The collected data was analyzed using bibliometric techniques. Bibliometrics is a branch of library and information science that uses quantitative methods to study bibliometric data [
29]. Previous studies [
12,
30] used this technique to identify and analyze the general pattern of a particular topic, such as a journal, research area, or region. Bibliometric studies have been used in the literature to assess the importance of a topic [
20] and the contributions of journals [
31,
32], and nations [
33].
This work employed the VOS viewer program to create a visual representation of the bibliographic content [
34]. The VOS viewer takes bibliographic data as an input and outputs it as graphs. Numerous bibliometric techniques were employed in this analysis, including the BC, co-citation, and co-occurrence of author keywords. BC happens when two documents cite the same third document [
35] (i.e., studies A and B commonly cite study C). The term “co-citation” [
36] refers to the occurrence of two papers being cited by the same third article (i.e., studies A and B receive a citation from study C). Additionally, co-occurrence of keywords is used to determine the keywords appearing more often in the same documents. As with the preceding notable bibliographic studies [
23], this review employed BC for authors and institutions and co-citation for documents and articles. The co-occurrence of keywords was used to categorize them into broad categories.
4. Conclusions
The use of bibliometrics helps to identify and classify scientific activity in a particular field, such as in journals, and serves as a tool for getting an idea of the key themes or trends in a given journal or academic field. The bibliometric research of a sole publication in a certain era of time offers valued evidence for seeing the growth and features of its systematic creation. Based on the Scopus results, this paper offers a bibliometric overview of electronic marketing investigation.
The aim of this research was to identify the productivity (number of articles) and degree of impact of the publishing institutions as a result, reacting to the need for a thorough examination of their scientific performance. According to the findings, the number of documents published each year has risen steadily over time. Simultaneously, as the number of documents has grown, so has the number of citations earned by articles, demonstrating the recognition of electronic marketing as a field of research. The 438 papers published and indexed in Scopus had a total of 6173 citations. The study obtained more than half of its citations in the last three years of the period from 2000 to 2019. This article, like every other research project, has some drawbacks that should be considered. One of these drawbacks, for example, is author affiliation, which can change over time, resulting in several papers by the same author having different affiliations. The findings, on the other hand, paint a picture of the current characteristics of electronic marketing research, which are expected to evolve over time. As a result, it is a good idea to stay up to date on emerging trends. Despite these flaws, this bibliometric review highlights the most critical developments in electronic marketing, which could be beneficial to both prospective authors and the media audiences interested in electronic marketing.