Multilingual topic evolution and comparative analysis for electronic commerce research: A combination of BERTopic and SBERT

Electronic commerce (EC) has become the most critical business activity in the world. China has become the world’s largest market for EC. Over the past three decades, numerous researches have examined the current status of the development of monolingual EC research in specific scenarios. However, the paradigm shift in EC development through the analysis of the dynamic evolution of semantic information has not yet been examined, and the distinctions and connections between multilingual EC studies have not yet been established. This study analyzed 16,207 English and 17,850 Chinese EC-related articles from the Web of Science database and CNKI by combining the BERTopic topic model and SBERT sentence embedding-based similarity computations. The results reveal the distributions of global and local topics in the English and Chinese EC literature, analyze the semantic intricacies of topic convergence and evolution across continuous time, as well as the distinctions and connections between English and Chinese topics. Finally, the evolutionary patterns and life cycle of three crucial English and Chinese topics are explored respectively, including their emergence, development, maturity, and decline. Overall, this study provides a comprehensive overview of EC studies from a topic perspective.