Abstract
Social commerce plays an important role in the service market and has risen in importance due to the rise of social network sites. This paper presents a comparative study of the development of social commerce driven by China’s practice and research in this field. By applying knowledge mapping, this paper makes a bibliometric analysis of 827 articles in Scopus (mostly written in English) and 673 articles in CNKI articles (written in Chinese) related to social commerce. Differences and similarities in research focus between English language papers (through Scopus) and Chinese language papers (through CNKI) are deeply explored. The results show that (1) In CNKI, research on social commerce decreases, while in Scopus, it is increasing. Now, China has the most literature on social commerce. (2) CNKI and Scopus each have their focus and complementary points. (3) The first five research topics of CNKI are group buying, social commerce, e-commerce, consumer and O2O. Scopus’s first five research topics are purchase interaction, social networking, collaborative commerce, group buying, and privacy concern. The new subdivision of social commerce (e.g., short video shopping, live shopping), mobile commerce and customer engagement are expected to become an important direction of future research. CNKI and Scopus have different and complementary focuses, and scholars should refer to both databases to better understand evolving research landscape on social commerce. This research combined with the bibliometric method is helpful for researchers and practitioners to better understand the development of social commerce.