Citation-based analysis of literature: a case study of technology acceptance research
Individual adoption of technology is crucial for the success of technology implementation and has thus attracted much attention from researchers. Recent advances in citation-based analysis have been suggested as being efficient for analyzing knowledge dissemination within scientific disciplines. This article presents a case that examines the technology acceptance research through the newly developed citation-based approach, in particular main path analysis and edge-betweenness clustering analysis. Based on the citation network constructed from a total of 1555 journal articles from the period 1989 to 2014, the most critical 50 citations were identified and used as the basis to map the major knowledge flow in technology acceptance research. In addition, edge-betweenness based clustering was used to classify the citation network into coherent groups. As a result, five distinct research fronts were identified, namely e-learning, mobile-commerce, e-health, e-tourism, and technology post-acceptance research. This case study highlights the theoretical development trajectories, and identifies the most active research fronts of technology acceptance research, providing a research-based platform for further scholarly discussions.
case study technology acceptance research main path analysis citation network bibliometrics