Mapping the intellectual landscape of social commerce research in the SME context: a bibliometric analysis (2016-2025)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47065/imj.v6i2.584Keywords:
social commerce, SMEs, bibliometric analysis, co-citation analysis, VOSviewerAbstract
Does social commerce research tell small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) how to sell, or only why consumers buy? We argue that SME research is peripheral to the field's thematic and intellectual core because the field has built its theories, methods, and canonical works around the individual consumer. We test this argument on 1,399 Scopus-indexed journal articles and reviews (2016–2025) with social commerce terms in their titles or author keywords, within which we identify 43 SME-related documents. Output grew at a compound annual rate of 25.9%, yet the SME share never exceeded 4.0% in any year after 2016. In the author-keyword network (73 keywords, eight clusters), the 'sme' node ranks 55th of 73 in total link strength and has no link to live streaming, impulse buying, or social presence. The co-citation network (332 references, four clusters) contains one organization-level adoption study, and SME documents draw fewer references from the field's 100 most-cited works than other documents (median 6.1% vs. 8.7%; p = 0.003). The difference persists when peripheral SME documents are removed, although not for the narrowest core definition. The result is an evidence base that explains buyer behavior but not seller action. We derive five research gaps, including organization-level theory for emerging-market SMEs such as local food businesses, and recommend multi-database designs, seller-side search vocabularies, Biblioshiny and bibliographic coupling, and empirical tests of SME-level frameworks.
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