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2013 15: 644 originally published online 26 November 2012New Media Society Tai-Quan Peng, Lun Zhang, Zhi-Jin Zhong and Jonathan JH Zhu

2009−journal articles 2000Mapping the landscape of Internet Studies: Text mining of social science

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Mapping the landscape ofInternet Studies: Text miningof social science journalarticles 2000–2009

Tai-Quan PengMacau University of Science and Technology, Macau, China

Lun ZhangCity University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Zhi-Jin ZhongSun Yat-Sen University, China

Jonathan JH ZhuCity University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Abstract

What does ‘Internet studies’ entail as a field of social science research? We aim to answer

the question by mapping research themes, theorization, and methodology of Internet

studies based on 27,000+ articles published in Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts &Humanities Citation Index journals over the last 10 years. In analyzing the articles, we

adopt a ‘bottom-up’ approach – classifying keywords of the Internet studies without anya priori categorization – to identify the boundaries, major divisions, and basic elementsof the field talis qualis. The research strategy results in a number of expected, as well

as surprising, patterns and trends. Internet studies have evolved into a viable field thathas witnessed a booming decade. The field is clustered around four primary research

themes: e-Health, e-Business, e-Society, and Human–Technology Interactions. Two orthree sub-themes with different research foci and methodologies emerge within each

theme. The evolution of popular keywords in each sub-theme further shows that the

Corresponding author:

Tai-Quan Peng, Faculty of Humanities and Arts, Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa,

Macau, China.

Email: [email protected]

462846NMS15510.1177/1461444812462846newmedia& societyPeng et al.2012

Article

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Peng et al. 645

field has become more concerned with intricate relationships between Internet use and

specific behaviors/attitudes/effects; Internet usage patterns have increasingly attractedresearch attention; and network perspectives and approaches have become popular.Internet studies in the past decade have been modestly theorized. Established research

methods (e.g., survey, experiment, and content analysis) still prevail in the Internetstudies reviewed.

Keywords

e-business, e-health, e-society, Human–Technology Interactions (HTIs), research

themes

Internet studies involve a wide-ranging agenda of established disciplines, including psy-

chology, sociology, marketing, and communication. To what extent have Internet studies been engaged in these disciplines? Has Internet studies become an independent field of

study or is it still an interdisciplinary subject area encompassing other fields (Baym,

2005)? Some researchers have debated the disciplinary nature of Internet studies (e.g.,

Hunsinger, 2005; Jones, 2005; Shrum, 2005). However, before addressing the discipli-

nary status of Internet studies, we require systematic and comprehensive information

about this emerging field.

Some efforts have been made to explore the state of art of Internet studies by focusing

on research themes and popular keywords within different timeframes. Kim and Weaver

(2002), Tomasello et al. (2010), and Rice and Fuller (2013) examined the characteristicsof Internet studies within one subject area (communication). Cho and Khang (2006)

expanded the horizon to include studies in three subject areas (i.e., communication,

advertising, and marketing).

Both Kim and Weaver (2002) and Tomasello et al. (2010) found that Internet studies

have become more and more visible in the communication discipline during the respec-

tive timeframes that they have examined. Kim and Weaver (2002) found that law and

policy issues concerning the Internet and use of the Internet were prominent research top-

ics in Internet studies. Tomasello et al. (2010) found that a small set of keyword terms

(i.e., Internet, computer, digital, web/www, and online) was heavily used in the titles ofnew media research. More recently, Rice and Fuller (2013) have reviewed the major theo-

retical approaches for studying social aspects of the Internet. They found that the most

frequent global themes in the study of communication and the Internet were social rela-

tions, followed by media implications/use and understanding, participation, societal,

media attributes, and general theory frameworks. By analyzing Internet studies published

in 15 journals in communication, marketing, and advertising between 1994 and 2003, Cho

and Khang (2006) found that there was a definite pattern of increase in Internet studies in

the examined timeframe. The authors observed that ‘Internet usage, perception, and atti-

tude toward the Internet’ (Cho and Khang, 2006: 151) was the most popular topic.

Lievrouw et al. (2001) reviewed research carried out by members of Communication

and Technology (CAT) Division of the International Communication Association and

identified several issues in CAT research as prominent, such as access and equity issues,

flows of information and communication content, and applications of CAT in social

interaction and education. By analyzing the papers presented at the annual conferences

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646 new media & society 15(5)

of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in 2003 and 2004, Rice (2005) identi-

fied two dimensions in AoIR research themes: one is the traditional dimension from

general social science research of ‘online/Internet/technology communication/commu-

nity at individual and cultural level’ to specific areas ‘ranging from public/political/user

to development/process/design/knowledge’ (Rice, 2005: 293), and the other is a move-ment from specific usage and content realms to more general and abstract processes and

concepts.

These reviews thus provide some information for understanding the problems and

opportunities in Internet studies. However, these studies focused on a pre-determined list

of journals or associations, which has obscured the interdisciplinary nature of Internet

studies and which may ‘lead to ordering, memory, familiarity, anchoring, or selection

biases’ (Polites and Watson, 2009: 597). As none of the established disciplines or asso-

ciations can claim that their field is ‘just one academic realm concerned with the Internet’

(Rice, 2005: 286), a ‘bottom-up’ approach (i.e., without any a priori categorization) ismore appropriate for drawing a comprehensive knowledge map for Internet studies.

To fill this gap in the literature, the study aims to map the landscape of Internet studies

without any pre-defined journals or disciplines. This is of particular value for delineating

the boundaries of Internet studies in a larger context and presenting first-hand and quan-

titative understanding of the interactions between Internet studies and other established

disciplines or other emerging fields. Specifically, the following research questions will

be addressed:

RQ1: What is the state of art of Internet studies in general?RQ2: What are the major themes in Internet studies?

RQ3: What are the popular keywords under each theme of Internet studies?

RQ4: How have these popular keywords evolved over time?

RQ5: What theoretical orientations and research methods are the most popular in

Internet studies?

Methods

The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science have been used

to retrieve the data for the study. The data were collected in September 2010. Six query

words (i.e., Internet, web, cyberspace, cyber-space, online, and on-line) were used to

search titles/abstracts/keywords of Internet-relevant articles from 2000 to 2009. Article

language was limited to English, and document type was limited to scholarly journal

articles. Document-level information from 27,340 relevant articles was retrieved, includ-

ing author(s), article title, journal title, abstract, author keywords, and cited references.

Analytical strategy

Firstly, words in abstracts were analyzed to extract research themes from the retrieved

Internet studies. Cluster analysis, which has been applied in business research (e.g.,

Sheppard, 1996) and educational research (e.g., Huberty et al., 2005), is adopted to

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Peng et al. 647

analyze the abstracts’ words in order to assign retrieved articles into theme clusters.

Articles in the same theme cluster are more similar to each other than to those in other

theme clusters. Specifically, two-step cluster analysis (Zhang et al., 1996) had been

employed to extract theme clusters from retrieved articles.

To identify popular keywords used in Internet studies, a text-mining approach (‘wordco-occurrence network’ analysis) is adopted to examine which keywords are the most

popular in Internet studies of the past decade. A network linkage between two keywords

is created when they co-occur in a study. The more frequently a keyword co-occurs with

other keywords, the more links the keyword has in the network, and the more popular the

keyword is assumed to be in Internet studies. Due to the fact that different words can be

used to describe the same concept, all words were standardized before processing (e.g.,

plural forms were standardized to their singular forms). The word co-occurrence network

analysis was performed with Wordij 3.0 software (Danowski, 2009).

To explore the evolution of popular keywords in Internet studies, we examine the riseand fall of the use of selected authors’ keywords during two periods: 2000–2002 and

2007–2009. The occurring frequencies of keywords during the first three-year period

(2000–2002) and the last three-year period (2007–2009) are summed as two composite

scores. According to the change of rank order of the total word frequencies between the

two periods, these keywords are classified into four categories: all-time favorites, rising

stars, fading stars, and peripherals.1 ‘All-time favorites’ refers to keywords that were in

the list of the top 50 frequently used keywords and remained at the same rank percentiles

during both periods; ‘rising stars’ refers to keywords whose rank orders moved up in

2007–2009; ‘fading stars’ refers to keywords that had moved down in rank order in2007–2009; and ‘peripherals’ refers to keywords whose frequencies of appearance were

not on the top 50 list in either period.

Findings

Overall patterns

To assess whether Internet studies have become a viable field in the social sciences, we

first examine the sheer quantity of relevant research activities (measured by the numberof publications). As reported earlier, we find 27,340 articles on Internet studies in SSCI

and A&HCI journals from 2000 to 2009. Is the volume of research output sufficient for

Internet studies to be considered as a field within the social sciences? We compare it with

the number of publications in four long-standing fields (each represented by a central

keyword of the respective field, including ‘politics’, ‘economy’, ‘society’, and ‘culture’)

and two newer fields (‘globalization/globalisation’ and ‘environment’) in the same data-

bases during the same period of time. As it turns out, ‘Internet’ ranks third among the

seven fields, below ‘environment’ (38,719) and ‘society’ (27,357), but above ‘culture’

(26,937), ‘economy’ (20,596), ‘politics’ (20,165), and ‘globalization’ (7,457). A closerlook at the changes within each of the seven fields reveals that ‘Internet’ has experienced

the second-fastest rate of growth in the last decade, trailing behind ‘environment’ only,

as shown in Figure 1. We recognize that these are crude measures, but they make clear

that Internet studies have witnessed a booming first decade in the 21st century.

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In the past decade, the Internet has transformed from the media-centric Web 1.0 to the

user-centric Web 2.0. It is informative to explore how responsive Internet researchers have

been to these technological advances. In our 10-year sample, the term ‘Web 2.0’ began toemerge in 2005. We therefore split the sample into two periods, 2000–2004 and 2005–

2009, and then identified Web 2.0 studies by searching Web 2.0-relevant words (e.g.,

Facebook, Wiki, YouTube, and Twitter) in the titles/abstracts/keywords of the articles. It

turns out that Internet researchers had paid attention to Web 2.0 applications even before

the word ‘Web 2.0’ formally appeared in 2005. Of the sample, 5% of the studies in 2000–

2004 dealt with Web 2.0 applications; the share rose to 9% in 2005–2009. Some earlier

forms of Web 2.0 applications (e.g., search engines, social shopping, instant messaging,

and peer-to-peer technologies) attracted scholarly interests in 2000–2004 and have contin-

ued to do so since 2005. Meanwhile, newer forms of Web 2.0 applications, such as blog-

ging, social networking, wiki, and micro-blogging, have entered the radar screen of Internet

researchers since 2005 and have become increasingly popular topics of Internet studies.

Research themes and popular keywords

Out of 27,340 articles of Internet studies located, 25,685 (94%) included an abstract, from

which we extracted 23,486 unique (i.e., non-duplicated) words for classifying research

themes. The use of particular words in the articles is highly uneven, with some popular

words (e.g., ‘use’, ‘survey’, ‘system’, ‘support’, ‘need’, ‘design’, ‘student’, and ‘process’)

appearing in many articles (up to 14,924), whereas other words (e.g., ‘technofetishism’

and ‘unboundedness’) being unique to only one article. This skewed distribution reflects

a pattern (known as power-law distribution or Zipf’s law) similar to that in the use of

language in daily life (Cancho and Sole, 2003; Zipf, 1949) and other academic writings

(Chen et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2010).

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

6,000

7,000

8,000

2000 2005 2009

N

o f A r t i c l e s i n S S C I / A & H

C I

Year of Publication

Environment

Internet

Society

Culture

Economy

Politics

Globalization

Figure 1. Number of publications in Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)/Arts & HumanitiesCitation Index (A&HCI) journals with seven central keywords in respective fields.

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Peng et al. 649

The finding that the use of words in Internet studies follows a power-law distribution

suggests that we could classify the articles based on a small set of the most commonly

used words without losing much information in the rest of the words. After discarding

our search query words (i.e., ‘Internet’, ‘online’, ‘web’, ‘cyberspace’ and their variants)

and non-discriminant words (e.g., ‘study’ and ‘paper’), we came up a list of the 1,885most commonly found words. Each of the 1,885 common words is used in at least 50

articles. Put differently, all 25,685 articles contain at least one of the common words and

90% of the articles include at least 24 common words. We use the 1,885 words as cluster-

ing variables to assign the 25,685 studies into different theme clusters.

Two rounds of two-step cluster analysis were performed. In the first round, four pri-

mary theme clusters (e-Health, e-Business,2 e-Society,2 and HTIs) were produced, each

accounting for 27%, 18%, 21%, and 34% of the sample, respectively. In the second

round, a separate cluster analysis was performed within each primary cluster for further

decomposition, generating eleven secondary clusters or sub-themes of smaller size andmore homogenous content, including two within e-Health (‘Generic Applications’ and

‘Specific Behaviors’), three within e-Business (‘Acceptance Studies’, ‘Management

and Internet’, and ‘Marketing and Internet’), three within e-Society (‘Social Interactions

and Internet’, ‘Law/Policy and Internet’, and ‘Communication and Internet’), and three

within HTIs (‘Psychological Processing and Internet’, ‘Web Search/e-Library’, and

‘e-Learning’). The structure and relative share of the four primary themes and eleven

sub-themes are reported in Figure 2.

While we will further elaborate in the following sections the research themes and sub-

themes, two surprising observations are in order here. Firstly, mainstream social scien-tists probably will not expect e-Health to emerge as a unique and prominent theme; as

such, a conventional literature review will not be able to detect its existence. Secondly,

Internet studies are not divided along the disciplinary boundaries of social sciences, such

as sociology, political science, economics, public administration, etc.; instead, the stud-

ies scatter around key issues such as interactions, communication, and regulation.

To discover popular keywords under each research sub-theme, a ‘co-occurrence net-

work analysis’ was performed to extract useful knowledge structure from large collec-

tions of author’s keywords of journal articles (Cohen et al., 2005). After excluding 184

commonly used English words,

3

11,778 unique words were extracted from the keywords provided by the original authors of the retrieved articles. Eleven co-occurrence networks

were constructed based on the paired presence of keywords in articles of 11 sub-themes.

The characteristics of these 11 co-occurrence networks are summarized in Table 1.

E-health. Of the top 20 most frequently occurring keywords in networks of two sub-themes

in e-Health, seven keywords in ‘e-Health: Generic Applications’ (‘health’, ‘care’, ‘nurs-

ing’, ‘patient’, ‘cancer’, ‘medical’, and ‘nurse’) are about health; and six in ‘e-Health:

Specific Behaviors’ (‘health’, ‘sexual’, ‘disorder’, ‘depression’, ‘intervention’, and ‘alco-

hol’) are related to health, after excluding Internet-relevant buzzwords (e.g., Internet,

online, information, research, and technology) in the co-occurrence networks.

In the two sub-themes of e-Health, different research foci emerge when we examined

the most frequently used keyword pairs in the two clusters. The research foci of ‘e-Health:

Generic Applications’ include: (1) generic applications of the Internet in healthy con-

texts, such as health care, home nursing, public health, mental health, and community

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F i g u r e 2 . F a m i l y t r e e o f r e s e a r c h t h e m e s a n d s u b - t h e m e s o f I n t e r n e t s t u d

i e s ( N =

2 5 , 6 8 5 ) .

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Peng et al. 651

health; and (2) generic applications of the Internet to improve health services, care qual-

ity, and nursing quality and to provide education and information for patients. The

research spotlight of ‘e-Health: Specific Behaviors’ is on the relationships between the

Internet and specific behaviors among specific groups of individuals. Those behaviors

include Internet addiction, sexual behavior, alcohol use, and smoking behavior. Specific

groups of individuals constituting the research subjects include, but are not limited to,

college students, adolescents, men, and HIV carriers.

E-business. After excluding the Internet-relevant buzzwords, keywords most frequently

co-occurring with other keywords in networks of three sub-themes in e-Business are

about business issues (‘e-commerce’, ‘consumer’, ‘service’, ‘management’, ‘market’,

‘marketing’, ‘chain’, ‘auction’, ‘price’, and ‘pricing’).

Out of three e-Business sub-themes, consumers’ acceptance of online shopping and

the role of trust in consumers’ acceptance of e-commerce are two prominent research

topics of ‘e-Business: Acceptance Studies’. Supply chain management in e-commerce

and customer services in e-commerce are two popular topics in ‘e-Business: Management

Table 1. Characteristics of keyword co-occurrence networks of 11 research sub-themes.

Research theme: sub-theme Number of

unique words

Number of

unique word

pairs

Network

clustering

coefficients

Nodes degree

Median Minimum Maximum

e-Health: Generic

Applications

2,709 23,564 0.64 6 2 726

e-Health: Specific Behaviors 3,365 28,971 0.62 6 2 982

e-Business: Acceptance

Studies

1,597 13,497 0.66 6 2 424

e-Business: Management and

Internet

2,066 17,447 0.64 6 2 584

e-Business: Marketing and

Internet

2,176 17,066 0.62 6 1 470

e-Society: Social Interactions

and Internet

3,124 20,546 0.64 6 1 833

e-Society: Law/Policy and

Internet

2,196 14,791 0.63 6 1 596

e-Society: Communication

and Internet

1,262 4,822 0.69 5 0 338

Human–Technology

Interactions:

Psychological Processing and

Internet

1,870 11,698 0.61 6 2 268

Human–Technology

Interactions:Web Search/e-Library

2,718 21,702 0.64 6 0 704

Human–Technology

Interactions:

e-Learning

2,920 28,729 0.67 6 1 1,023

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and Internet’. Studies in ‘e-Business: Marketing and Internet’ focus on auction/bidding

in e-commerce and pricing mechanisms in e-commerce.

E-society. Keywords most frequently co-occurring with other keywords in networks of

three sub-themes in e-Society are about social science issues (‘social’, ‘network’,‘media’, ‘communication’, ‘community’, ‘public’, ‘identity’, ‘culture’, ‘policy’, and

‘development’).

Among three e-Society sub-themes, the popular keyword pairs of ‘e-Society: Social

Interactions and Internet’ are online/virtual community, social capital/social community,

social identity, and political participation. The popular keywords in ‘e-Society: Law/

Policy and Internet’ include digital divide, governments’ policies towards the Internet,

and information privacy and security. The popular topics of ‘e-Society: Communication

and Internet’ are individuals’ communication behaviors on the Internet.

Human–Technology Interactions. The three sub-themes in HTIs emphasize applications of

the Internet as a technological platform in three different settings. After excluding the

Internet-relevant buzzwords, keywords most frequently co-occurring with other key-

words in network of ‘HTI: Psychological Processing and Internet’ are those about psy-

chological processing (‘memory’, ‘visual’, ‘comprehension’, ‘attention’, ‘perception’,

and ‘ERP’); those keywords in the network of ‘HTI: Web Search/e-Library’ are termi-

nologies in computer science and library science (‘search’, ‘retrieval’, ‘database’,

‘design’, ‘engine’, ‘library’, ‘document’, and ‘system’); and those keywords in the net-

work of ‘HTI: e-Learning’ are concepts about learning (‘learning’, ‘education’, ‘e-learn-

ing’, ‘teaching’, ‘student’, ‘instruction’, and ‘teacher’).

Motor control, language processing, and memory processing are three popular key-

word pairs in ‘HTI: Psychological Processing and Internet’. Information retrieval, digital

library, and knowledge management are three prevalent topics in ‘HTI: Web Search/e-

Library’. Web-based/distance learning and interactive/cooperative/collaborative learn-

ing are popular keywords in ‘HTI: e-Learning’.

Evolution of popular keywords

To examine the evolution of popular keywords in different sub-themes of Internet stud-ies, we developed a typology to classify keywords of Internet studies into four catego-

ries: all-time favorites, rising stars, fading stars, and peripherals.

Internet studies in the 11 sub-themes have been dominated by a small set of all-time

favorite keywords during 2000–2009, while most of the keywords are in the peripheral

area. Moreover, different sub-themes vary in the sustainability of popular keywords. The

percentages of all-time favorites in the three e-Business sub-themes are higher than those

in the other eight sub-themes, implying that researchers have developed a set of sustain-

ably shared interests in these three sub-themes. The percentages of rising stars and fading

stars in ‘e-Society: Communication and Internet’ are substantially higher than those inother sub-themes, suggesting that research topics in this sub-theme come and go at a

faster pace than those in other sub-themes.

Although these all-time favorites, rising stars, and fading stars are categories of dis-

crete words, some general trends can be observed. Firstly, Internet studies have become

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Peng et al. 653

more concerned with intricate relationships between the Internet and specific behaviors/

attitudes/effects among specific research subjects. Secondly, although ‘acceptance stud-

ies’ remained a popular topic over the past decade, studies on Internet usage patterns

have grown in popularity in recent years. Thirdly, contextualizing Internet studies in a

network perspective is either an all-time practice or a promising trend for the future.In ‘e-Health: Generic Applications’, researchers demonstrate consistent interest in

applications of the Internet in health information acquisition and in nursing and care.

Moreover, researchers have become increasingly interested in adoption of the Internet

among specific groups of people (e.g., cancer patients, nurses, and children) and in spe-

cific healthy settings (e.g., training, therapy, and learning). In ‘e-Health: Specific

Behaviors’, relationships between the Internet and sexual behavior, alcohol behavior,

and smoking behavior have attracted more research attention over time, while Internet-

related addiction phenomena has declined in popularity.

In three e-Business sub-themes, e-commerce was a shared all-time favorite keyword inthe past decade. In ‘e-Business: Acceptance Studies’, trust, satisfaction, intention, loyalty,

and decision are ‘rising star’ keywords. Interestingly, ‘use’ emerges as a rising star and

‘acceptance’ is a fading star in this sub-theme, suggesting that acceptance studies have

entered into a post-acceptance era focusing more on consumers’ post-adoption behaviors.

In ‘e-Business: Management and Internet’, network, mobile, satisfaction, and security have

become popular keywords in recent years. In ‘e-Business: Marketing and Internet’, auc-

tion, pricing, competition, and bidding are four all-time favorite keywords, whereas game,

channel, choice, advertising, and retailing became rising stars in 2000–2009.

In three e-Society sub-themes, ‘social’ is a shared all-time favorite keywords. In‘e-Society: Social Interactions and Internet’, culture, globalization, sociology, and power

have begun fading away, while network, identity, discourse, blog, news, politics, and

relation have become more visible since 2007. In ‘e-Society: Law/Policy and Internet’,

network and community, as well as security, divide, and risk issues about the Internet and

e-government, have also grown in popularity; while regulation, development, and capital

have lost their initial prevalence. In ‘e-Society: Communication and Internet’, law issues

about the Internet have become less popular, along with journalism and e-commerce,

while broadband, gambling, advertising, and game have grown in popularity over time.

In ‘HTI: Psychological Processing and Internet’, visual, prime, cognitive, ambiguity,acquisition, and semantics have become more visible in 2007–2009, while attention,

performance, and response have begun to lose their prevalence. In ‘HTI: Web Search/e-

Library’, researchers paid more attention to users and semantics/language/text in 2007–

2009; while database, software, and navigation appear less and less frequently. In ‘HTI:

e-Learning’, e-learning has become an ad hoc keyword among researchers, while

evaluation and assessment are two all-time favorite keywords.

Theoretical orientations and research methods

Our final research question is that of the theoretical orientations and research methods in

Internet studies. Firstly, we assess the theoretical orientation (or lack of it) of the studies

based on the most frequently used references in Internet studies.4 The results are reported

in Table 2.

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T a b l e 2 . T h e

o r e t i c a l o r i e n t a t i o n o f I n t e r n e

t s t u d i e s .

O v e r a l l

p a t t e r n

e - H e a l t h

e - B u s i n e s s

e - S o c i e t y

H u m a n – T e c h n o l o g y

I n t e r a c t i o n s

G e n e r i c

A p p l i c a t i o n s

S p e c i f i c

B e h a v i o r s

A c c e p t a n c e

S t u d i e s

M a n a g e m e n t

a n d I n t e r n e t

M a r k e t i n g


S o c i a l



L a w /

P o l i c y a n d

I n t e r n e t

C o m m u n i c a t i o n


P s y c h o l o g i c a l

P r o c e s s i n g


W e b S e a r

c h /

e - L i b r a r y

e - L e a r n i n g

% o f t h e I n t e r n e t

s t u d i e s c o n s i d e r e d

t o b e t h e o r e t i c a l l y

o r i e n t e d ( i . e . ,

c i t i n g t h e o r e t i c a l

r e f e r e n c e s )

3 1 %

1 1 %

2 8 %

7 7 %

4 1 %

3 7 %

4 3 %

2 7 %

2 7 %

3 1 %

2 3 %

2 8 %

T h e o r e t i c a l

d o m a i n

D i f f u s i o n

2 0 %

1 1 %

1 3 %

6 5 %

2 9 %

6 %

1 8 %

2 5 %

1 9 %

3 %

7 %

1 5 %

U s e

2 9 %

5 %

1 4 %

5 9 %

2 5 %

4 0 %

2 3 %

2 0 %

2 9 %

2 6 %

4 3 %

3 5 %

E f f e c t s

2 8 %

1 7 %

2 4 %

4 7 %

1 6 %

6 %

6 2 %

3 3 %

3 7 %

1 4 %

9 %

3 6 %

U s e a n d e f f e c t s

1 8 %

6 %

1 9 %

2 4 %

1 3 %

5 %

2 0 %

1 4 %

1 6 %

2 8 %

4 %

3 4 %

S t r u c t u r e a n d

c o n t e n t

7 %

1 %

1 %

2 %

6 %

3 %

2 3 %

2 0 %

1 8 %

1 %

1 0 %

4 %

B u s i n e s s m o d e l s

1 5 %

1 %

1 %

4 0 %

4 8 %

6 4 %

7 %

1 1 %

1 6 %

1 %

3 %

2 %

R e g u l a t i o n

1 %

0 %

0 %

2 %

1 %

0 %

3 %

1 0 %

4 %

0 %

0 %

0 %

T e c h n i c a l

4 %

1 %

1 %

4 %

5 %

1 %

4 %

6 %

4 %

2 %

1 2 %

4 %

N o n - I n t e r n e t

7 %

6 %

5 %

4 %

3 %

1 %

1 3 %

7 %

4 %

3 2 %

3 %

9 %

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Peng et al. 655

Only about 30% of Internet studies cite one or more theoretical references, suggesting

that Internet studies in the past decade were modestly theorized. However, different sub-

themes vary substantially. Studies in e-Business sub-themes are the most theoretically

oriented, followed by those in e-Society and HTI. Internet studies in e-Health are the

least theoretically driven.Interestingly, a few theoretical domains are popular across the research sub-themes.

As shown in Table 2, the studies in most of the sub-themes cite references in the domains

of Diffusion, Use, and Effects. In addition, studies in e-Business are more likely to cite

theories of Internet Business Models, the studies in e-Society are more likely to draw on

theories of structure and content of the Internet, and the studies in ‘HTI: Web Search/e-

Library’ are more likely to follow technical theories of the Internet.

To understand what methods were used in Internet studies in the past decade, we have

randomly drawn a sub-sample from the data, with 100 studies from each of the 11 sub-

themes, and then have coded manually the methods employed in these studies. The cod-ing result is summarized in Table 3. Generally speaking, quantitative approach, employed

by 59% of the sub-sample, dominated Internet studies in the past decade. Qualitative

approach and other approaches (e.g., system evaluation, algorithm development, and

policy discussions) account for 19% and 11%, respectively. Of quantitative methods,

survey, experiment, and content analysis were the most frequently used, whereas case

study and in-depth interviews/focus groups were the most commonly used qualitative

methods. It is worth noting that 5% of the sub-samples did not involve any explicit

method, quantitative or qualitative, as there is no empirical test or evaluation in the

studies. Another 5% are reviews that assess the history, current status, or future ofInternet-related issues.

The Internet studies in different sub-themes differ from each other in the diversity of

research methods used. The studies in e-Society are the most heterogeneous in research

methods, with no single method playing a clear-cut leading role in any of the sub-themes.

On the other hand, four other sub-themes are highly homogenous, including ‘e-Health:

Specific Behaviors’ and ‘e-Business: Acceptance Studies’, both of which heavily rely on

surveys; ‘e-Business: Marketing and Internet’, which concentrates on econometrics,

experiment, and field data; and ‘HTI: Psychological Processing and Internet’, which

focuses on experiment research. Overall, the established social science research methodsare well present among the Internet studies reviewed. However, newer methods of data

collection, such as web content mining and user traffic records, are infrequently used to

study the new medium.

Conclusion and discussion

To map the landscape of Internet studies, the study has adopted a ‘bottom-up’ approach

(i.e., without any a priori categorization) to analyze social sciences journal articles on the

Internet published in 2000–2009. The findings of the study advance our understanding of

the research themes, theorization, and methodology of Internet studies in a comprehen-

sive and quantitative way.

Firstly, Internet studies have developed into a substantial field in terms of number of

studies published in the past decade, contrary to Herring’s (2004) speculations about a

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T a b l e 3 . R e s e a r c h m e t h o d s o f I n t e r n e t s t u d i e s .

M e t h o d s e m p l o y e d

O v e r a l l

P a t t e r n

e - H e a l t h

e - B u s i n e s s

e - S o c i e t y

H u m a n – T e c h n o l o g y I n t e r a c t i o n s

G e n e r i c


S p e c

i f i c

B e h a v i o r s

A c c e p t a n c e

S t u d i e s

M a n a g e m e n t


M a r k e t i n g

a n d

I n t e r n e t

S o c i a l



L a w /

P o l i c y a n d

I n t e r n e t

C o m m u n i c a t i o n

a n

d I n t e r n e t


P r o c e s s i n g


W e b S e a r c h

/

e - L i b r a r y

e - L e a r n i n g

T h e o r e t i c a l

d e v e l o p m e n t

5 %

0 %

2 %

1 %

1 5 %

3 %

4 %

1 2 %

7 %

0 %

2 %

7 %

R e v i e w

5 %

1 3 %

2 %

2 %

1 0 %

1 %

0 %

5 %

7 %

3 %

1 0 %

7 %

Q u a n t i t a t i v e a p p r o a c h

S u r v e y

2 3 %

3 5 %

5 9 %

7 1 %

1 6 %

8 %

1 9 %

1 3 %

1

3 %

3 %

9 %

2 3 %

E x p e r i m e n t

1 5 %

9 %

2 5 %

1 9 %

6 %

1 6 %

1 %

4 %

6 %

7 8 %

1 9 %

1 7 %

C o n t e n t a n a l y s i s

6 %

4 %

3 %

0 %

3 %

2 %

1 4 %

8 %

1

5 %

0 %

7 %

5 %

F i e l d d a t a ( e . g . , c l i e n t /

s e r v e r l o g - f i l e s a n d d i a r y )

5 %

7 %

0 %

2 %

7 %

1 4 %

3 %

1 %

2 %

5 %

1 1 %

2 %

E c o n o m e t r i c s

5 %

0 %

0 %

2 %

5 %

3 2 %

0 %

0 %

1 %

0 %

0 %

0 %

S i m u l a t i o n

2 %

0 %

0 %

0 %

1 %

1 0 %

0 %

0 %

1 %

0 %

1 %

0 %

A n a l y z i n g p u b l i s h

e d d a t a /

s t a t i s t i c s

2 %

0 %

0 %

1 %

2 %

4 %

3 %

6 %

4 %

0 %

0 %

0 %

O t h e r s

1 %

0 %

0 %

1 %

3 %

2 %

1 %

0 %

3 %

0 %

1 %

1 %

S u b t o t a l

5 9 %

5 6 %

8 8 %

9 6 %

4 1 %

8 8 %

4 1 %

3 3 %

4

6 %

8 6 %

4 9 %

4 8 %

Q u a l i t a t i v e a p p

r o a c h

C a s e s t u d y

8 %

7 %

0 %

0 %

1 2 %

2 %

5 %

1 3 %

1

2 %

0 %

1 4 %

1 2 %

I n - d e p t h i n t e r v i e w / f o c u s

g r o u p

5 %

1 3 %

7 %

0 %

6 %

0 %

9 %

7 %

6 %

0 %

1 %

1 4 %

C u l t u r a l / c r i t i c a l s

t u d i e s

3 %

0 %

0 %

0 %

1 %

0 %

1 8 %

1 %

4 %

0 %

1 %

0 % ( C o n t i n u e d )

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Peng et al. 657

M e t h o d s e m p l o y e d

O v e r a l l

P a t t e r n

e - H e a l t h

e - B u s i n e s s

e - S o c i e t y

H u m a n – T e c h n o l o g y I n t e r a c t i o n s

G e n e r i c


S p e c i f i c

B e h a v i o r s

A c c e p t a n c e

S t u d i e s

M a n a g e m e n t


M a r k e t i n g

a n d

I n t e r n e t

S o c i a l



L a w /

P o l i c y a n d

I n t e r n e t

C

o m m u n i c a t i o n



P r o c e s s i n g


W e b S e a r c h /

e - L i b r a r y

e - L e a r n i n g

F i e l d o b s e r v a t i o n

/

e t h n o g r a p h y

2 %

2 %

2 %

1 %

2 %

0 %

7 %

1 %

2 %

0 %

0 %

0 %

T e x t / s e m i o t i c / d i s c o u r s e

a n a l y s i s

2 %

2 %

0 %

0 %

1 %

0 %

7 %

4 %

6 %

0 %

0 %

2 %

S u b t o t a l

1 9 %

2 4 %

8 %

1 %

2 1 %

2 %

4 7 %

2 6 %

3

0 %

0 %

1 6 %

2 8 %

O t h e r s

S y s t e m e v a l u a t i o n /

A l g o r i t h m d e v e l o

p m e n t

5 %

0 %

0 %

0 %

7 %

4 %

1 %

3 %

1 %

1 1 %

2 0 %

9 %

P o l i c y / r e g u l a t i o n

d i s c u s s i o n s

3 %

2 %

0 %

0 %

2 %

2 %

2 %

1 6 %

7 %

0 %

0 %

0 %

M i s c e l l a n e o u s

2 %

6 %

0 %

0 %

3 %

1 %

4 %

5 %

2 %

0 %

3 %

2 %

S u b t o t a l

1 1 %

7 %

0 %

0 %

1 2 %

7 %

7 %

2 4 %

1

0 %

1 1 %

2 3 %

1 1 %

T a b l e 3 . ( C o

n t i n u e d )

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demise of Internet studies. Journal articles on the Internet have demonstrated a dramatic

increase in the past decade, with an average growth rate of 13%. Secondly, Internet stud-

ies can be clustered around four primary research themes: e-Health, e-Business, e-Society,

and HTIs. This finding seems to support the argument that ‘specific genres of Internet

studies seem to fairly easily domesticate into existing university rubrics’ (Baron, 2005:270). However, research sub-themes and popular keywords emerging within primary

themes suggest that Internet studies cannot perfectly fit into established disciplines. For

example, the second sub-theme of e-Health, which focuses on the relationship between

the Internet and specific behaviors, can be a concern of sociologists, psychiatrists, com-

munication scholars, and political scientists. Therefore, we argue that Internet studies are

a melting pot that attracts researchers from different disciplines to transcend their disci-

plinary boundaries to develop new theoretical, methodological, and practical concerns.

Future trends in Internet studies: Usage studies and network

perspectives

The study empirically confirms the taken-for-granted statement that adoption, use, and

effects of the Internet have been investigated among individuals (i.e., either among the

general public or among individuals with certain characteristics), organizations (e.g.,

commercial organizations, healthy organizations, and education institutions), and the

society. Adoption has received the most extensive examination, which has developed

into a unique sub-theme (e-Business: Acceptance Studies) in Internet studies. Effect

studies are also extensively conducted in every sub-theme, which is consistent with theobservation that ‘there is no social science discipline that does not study the effects of the

Internet’ (Walther, 2010: 489).

The most under-developed field in the past decade is usage studies, which is expected

to become more prominent in the near future, as shown by the occurrence of ‘use’ or

‘user’ as rising stars of keywords in several sub-themes of Internet studies. The increas-

ing popularity of Web 2.0 studies will catalyze the development of usage studies in

Internet studies. This pattern has recurred in media studies – the earliest publications just

expressed concerns or enthusiasms for the new medium, whereas later studies became

more realistic and focused less on effects and more on how the medium is used, because‘technology is not independent of context (users, situation, economics, etc.) nor is it

“neutral” in relation to those who design, implement, and use it’ (Fulk and Gould, 2009:

764). To better understand individuals’ behavioral pattern on the Internet, it is necessary

to unpack or decompose general Internet use into use of specific features of the Internet

(Baym, 2009; Fulk and Gould, 2009; Walther et al., 2005) and examine how Internet

users interact with each other using different features (e.g., blogging, photo-sharing,

video-sharing) offered at multiple platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon,

Flickr). More importantly, researchers should go beyond technical features and uncover

the underlying communicative processes these surface features of technologies serve, asthis can help recognize ‘common cause with researchers working on broader domains

and theories of communication’ (Parks, 2009: 725).

Another noticeable trend is the increasing popularity of a network perspective in

Internet studies, which is well illustrated by the fact that network/community has become

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Peng et al. 659

a rising star among keywords in six sub-themes of Internet studies. This trend embodies

a research paradigm shift brought about by the Internet. In the past, agents using the

Internet (i.e., individuals, groups, or organizations) were considered either ‘senders’ or

‘receivers’ of information. However, network perspective ‘entails both aspects of com-

munication simultaneously according to communicators’ contexts, meanings, and pur- poses’ (Lievrouw et al., 2001: 287). The old criticism that network studies were ‘merely

descriptive’ or ‘just methodological pieces’ is no longer tenable. Nowadays, network

perspectives are a rich resource of explanations for social phenomena in a wide variety

of disciplines (Borgatti et al., 2009). Network perspectives can be applied to examine the

structure of the Internet itself (e.g., Zhu et al., 2008), and to examine the structure of

communication (e.g., Panzarasa et al., 2009) and social networks (e.g., Chau and Xu,

2007) formed over the Internet. The Internet, which was originally characterized a net-

work of networks (Berners-Lee, 1999), provides a platform to falsify, test, and/or develop

different network theories/perspectives.

Theorization to be enhanced and methods to be innovated

Internet studies have been criticized as trailing the development of technologies without

taking serious consideration of the theoretical implications of technical features (Walther

et al., 2005). Our work empirically shows that (1) Internet studies in some sub-themes

(e.g., e-Society: Communication and Internet) demonstrate less sustainability concern-

ing popular keywords than Internet studies in other themes; (2) Internet studies over the

past decade have generally been only modestly theorized; and (3) Internet studies indifferent sub-themes vary substantially in the extent of theorization.

It is understandable that researchers trace emerging Internet applications, because this

can provide useful heuristic information for sophisticated studies. Nevertheless, a better

response to rapid technological development is to draw on theories and models to iden-

tify and understand emerging technologies and their users (Scott, 2009). We agree with

the argument of Rice and Fuller (2013) that Internet researchers should balance breadth

and depth in theorization.

Firstly, in terms of breadth in theorization, researchers affiliated in one field should

look outside to connect their studies with broader theoretical frameworks available inother fields. In our work, Internet studies in each sub-theme share theories concerning

three domains (diffusion, use, and effects). These shared theoretical domains can help

researchers interested in various research themes or topics to exchange views and per-

haps collaborate with one another. However, the shared theoretical approaches need to be

broadened to include domains beyond just diffusion–use–effects domains.

One possible and promising theoretical domain might be the structure and content of

the Internet. The popularity of Web 2.0 and the semantic web has made issues of the struc-

ture and content of the Internet more prominent in Internet studies across different sub-

themes. For example, how do consumers interact with each other by posting comments ateBay or Amazon? How do cancer patients interact with each other on Facebook to form a

network, and what are the characteristics of the network? How do students in universities

interact with professors via Twitter or Facebook? Theories in the domain of Structure and

Content could help researchers address these interesting questions efficiently.

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Secondly, with regard to the depth of theorization, researchers should try to identify

the triggering or boundary conditions of theories (i.e., how, and under what conditions,

cause–outcome relationships can take place) (Walther, 2010). Studies in three e-Business

sub-themes did this. In these studies, some classical theories, such as the Theory of

Reasoned Action (TRA; Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980) and the Theory of Planned Behavior(TPB; Ajzen, 1991), have often been applied as theoretical frameworks to address

Internet-relevant issues. Nevertheless, these applications were not simply replications of

the theories in the context of the Internet, but had ‘been stretched, reboundaried, and

expanded’ (Walther et al., 2005: 651) to identify some niche variables to explain Internet-

related behaviors or to discover some moderating variables that can condition their

explanatory power. For example, some new factors have been incorporated into the TRA

or Technology Acceptance Model (TAM, see Davis et al., 1989) to explain the adoption

of the Internet or specific applications, such as playfulness (Moon and Kim, 2001), trust

and perceived risk (Pavlou, 2003), and product involvement (Koufaris, 2003).Although Internet studies are a domain ‘plagued by the notion that everything is

new’ (Baym, 2009: 720), methods employed in Internet studies are not so innovative,

and traditional social science research methods (i.e., survey, experiment, and content

analysis) remain dominant. These traditional methods have played and will continue to

play significant roles in Internet studies. However, in addition to these, the rise of user-

centered studies and network perspectives in Internet studies calls for innovative

research tools. Nowadays, the development of information technologies has made ‘tera-

bytes of data describing minute-by-minute interactions and locations of entire popula-

tions of individuals’ (Lazer et al., 2009: 722) accessible to Internet researchers, allowingthem to describe, explain, and predict Internet users’ online behavioral pattern in a more

reliable manner. Web 2.0 technologies have provided golden opportunities to ‘capture,

tag, and manifest high-resolution high-fidelity relational metadata’ (Contractor, 2009:

744), which can help us understand the structure of complex social networks and

explore the mechanisms driving the evolution of those networks.

Limitations and future direction

The present study is limited by the quality of abstracts and keywords used to extractresearch themes and to identify popular keywords of Internet studies. We certainly can-

not claim that abstracts and keywords of all journal articles included in the study per-

fectly convey the themes or foci of the articles concerned. However, the journals listed

in the two databases (i.e., SSCI and AandHCI) are top journals in their subject categories.

We are confident that the abstracts and keywords of articles published in these journals

are of adequate quality for analysis.

Although four primary themes and eleven sub-themes emerge for Internet studies in

the study, it is necessary to emphasize that these themes are not mutually exclusive, but in

fact overlap each other. Our analysis of the evolution of popular keywords in each sub-

theme provides some evidence for this type of inter-theme overlap. However, this evi-

dence is far from adequate. It is theoretically significant to explore inter-theme interaction

in Internet studies to examine how these research themes co-evolve with each other.

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Peng et al. 661

The study also suffers from the so-called ‘file drawer effect’. Although the study ana-

lyzes a large volume of Internet studies, it does not exhaust all. One neglected source is

those studies presented at various conferences, of which only a small proportion is pub-

lished in the journals listed in the two databases of ISI. It would be informative to com-

pare research themes of Internet studies between conference proceedings and journalarticles in the future.

Acknowledgements

We thank Hai Liang, Heng Lu, Jie Qin, Chengjun Wang, and Zhenzhen Wang for their advice on

the study, Xiyue Cao for her assistance in data collection, and anonymous reviewers and editors of

this special issue for their insightful comments.

Funding

This study has been funded by Strategic Research Grant (7002652) from City University of Hong

Kong.

Notes

1. The typology is developed according to the change of rank order of summated words occur-

ring frequency in two periods, as shown in the table below.

Rank order of occurring frequencies (2007–2009)

1–10 11–30 31–50 51 or above

Rank order ofoccurring frequencies(2000–2002)

1–10 All-timefavorite

Fading star Fading star Fading star

11–30 Rising star All-time favorite Fading star Fading star

31–50 Rising star Rising star All-time favorite Fading star 51 or above Rising star Rising star Rising star Peripherals

2. Initially, e-Society and e-Business were grouped together in one big cluster (39% of the

sample) with the largest number of secondary clusters (six). Based on the clear-cut division

between the three secondary clusters of e-Business and e-Society and the findings from

subsequent co-occurrence network analysis (see the next section), we split e-Business and

e-Society into two primary clusters.

3. For a list of these 184 English words, please visit https://github.com/jdf/cue.language/blob/

master/src/cue/lang/stop/english.

4. Briefly, we have manually coded 35 references that are most frequently cited in each of the 11

sub-themes (i.e., a total of 357 references examined), defining the references as ‘theoretically

oriented’ if one or more theoretical perspectives are explicitly present in the reference. We

then have coded the domains of the theoretical perspectives and have mapped the resulting

theoretical orientations and theoretical domains of all the studies that cite the 357 references.

Since some references are heavily cited in more than one cluster, the total number of coded

references is less than 385 (35 × 11 = 385).

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Author biographies

Tai-Quan Peng is an Assistant Professor in Faculty of Humanities and Arts, Macau

University of Science and Technology, Macau. Email: [email protected].

8/10/2019 00b4952ba8f845cb60000000.pdf



Lun Zhang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Web Mining Lab, Department of Media

and Communication, City University of Hong Kong. Email: [email protected].

Zhi-Jin Zhong is an Associate Professor at School of Communication and Design, Sun

Yat-Sen University, China. Email: [email protected].

Jonathan JH Zhu is a Professor and Founding Director of Web Mining Lab in Department

of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong. Email: [email protected].

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