Exploring the academic development trace and theme evolution in Cross-Border Electronic Commerce

The prosperity of cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) has boosted the global economy and strengthened international trade ties. It arouses wide attentions among scholars, which leads to the appearance of massive researches in the CBEC field, which makes it difficult to do a comprehensive and objective analysis in CBEC field by traditional literature review methods. Two bibliometric methods, main path analysis (MPA) and science mapping technology (SciMAT), are used in this study to explore the significant knowledge development trajectory and identify the academic theme evolution in the CBEC field. The CBEC field has three academic origins, namely strategic research, culture adaptability, and online marketing. The theme evolution analysis identifies the key academic themes in different periods; we divide the CBEC field into five different research clusters according to the evolution relations. This study comprehensively analyzes the development process and structures the knowledge construction for the CBEC field, which is advantageous to deepen the understanding of CBEC and provide the enlightenment for future researches.