Research on electronic word-of-mouth for product and service quality improvement: bibliometric analysis and future directions

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to analyze high-quality papers on the research of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) for product and service quality improvement from 2009 to 2022, in order to fully understand their historical progress, current situation and future development trend.Design/Methodology/ApproachThis paper adopts the bibliometrics method to analyze the relevant literature, including publishing trend and citation status, regional and discipline area distribution, and influential publications. Secondly, the VOSviewer is used for literature co-citation analysis and keyword co-occurrence analysis to obtain the basic literature and research hotspots in this research field.FindingsFirstly, the study finds that the number of publications basically shows an increasing trend, and those publications are mainly published in tourism journals. In addition, among these papers, China has the largest number of publications, followed by the USA and South Korea. Through co-citation analysis of literature and keyword co-occurrence analysis, 22 foundational papers and six main research topics are obtained in this paper. Finally, this paper elaborates on the development trend of the research topic and future research directions in detail.Originality/valueThis is the first paper that uses bibliometrics to analyze and review relevant researches on eWOM for product and service quality improvement, which is helpful for researchers to quickly understand its development status and trend. This review also provides some future research directions and provides a reference for further research.