Bibliometric analysis of scientific production on sharing economy.
| Autor | Lima, Sergio |
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Introduction
The sharing economy began in the 1990s in the USA, mainly as an outcome of the technological progress that led to cost cuttings in online transactions (Shirky, 2012). There are alternative versions for the term: according to Dubois, Schor, and Carfagna (2014), it was termed as online consumption; Botsman and Rogers (2009) adopted collaborative consumption; one can also find peer-to-peer markets (Einav, Farronato, & Levin, 2016) and peer-to-peer economy (Weber, 2016), among others.
Variations of this term also identified in the literature are "collaborative consumption" and "collaborative economy." According to Botsman and Rogers (2009), a shared economy is typified by non-ownership, temporary access and redistribution of less tangible material goods or assets, such as money, space or time. In addition, these systems rely mainly on new information technologies, making this form of consumption highly accessible, flexible and easy to share. According to Gansky (2010), it is a socioeconomic system developed around the sharing of resources, human or physical, and it comprises the creation, production, distribution, marketing and shared consumption of goods and services by people or organizations.
Despite the variety of terms, which indicates an emerging unconsolidated theme, they all share the nature of the phenomenon in question: people selling, buying, renting or lending products and services among themselves, usually--but not necessarily--with support of IT platforms, a trend that is inserted in the environment of new organizations and new business models, which are focused on sharing (Gansky, 2010).
The growing interest in the subject has not yet materialized in broader studies aimed at mapping research in this field. Few studies on the subject have a bibliometric characteristic; hence, it is understood that this research can fill the gap in scientific literature and promote the development of this subject. Taking into account the potential impact on researching sharing economy in a broad spectrum of knowledge fields and practical contexts, this research aimed to map the international scientific production on sharing economy.
Publications in journals are commonly used as object of analysis to evaluate scientific production in a given field of knowledge, investigating parameters such as authors, research centers, keywords, citations, journals and research networks.
Bibliometric studies deal with such an approach and are understood by Lacerda, Santos, Freitas, and Alvarenga (2015) as studies from the field of information sciences aimed at quantifying what has already been published and evaluating the evolution of related areas and fields. Zupic and Cater (2015) highlighted that the basic items of bibliometric analysis are authors, publications, citations, co-citations, partnerships, co-authorships, research centers' identification, such as universities, countries and journals, as well as the interrelationship among these attributes. Thus, bibliometric studies serve as support in research guiding on emerging themes, since they are not yet consolidated in the academic-scientific environment. In this sense, this research investigates the subject "sharing economy," still embryonic in the academic research field, mainly in Brazil.
Goulart and Carvalho (2008) argued that international scientific production has a greater impact due to the fact that it covers studies published in English; hence, international publications prepared in this language and published in the Scopus knowledge base, a comprehensive database of scientific journals, were chosen as the object of this study.
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Literature review
2.1 Sharing economy
Consumption practices in the context of sharing economy are based on the exchange, sharing, rental or borrowing of goods, resources or services, usually among unknown people who seek to meet latent needs (Botsman & Rogers, 2009). Such practices do not include sharing activities without compensation involved, such as donations, since this modality implies permanent transfer of ownership (Belk, 2014a).
Study topics on sharing economy are diverse. Teubner and Flath (2015) and Weber (2016) discuss information technology. Legal and regulatory aspects are also a subject of study, such as those of Morgan and Kuch (2015), Miller (2016) and Nerinckx (2016). Other studies address the impact of sharing economy in specific sectors of the economy, such as McArthur (2015) and Wekerle and Classens (2015) for agriculture, Germann Molz (2013) and Cheng (2016) for tourism and hospitality and Ballus-Armet, Shaheen, Clonts, and Weinzimmer (2014) and Shaheen, Chan, and Gayno (2016) for the transport and urban mobility sector, among others.
Other research trends in the field of sharing economy have discussed its link with sustainable consumption and the impacts on sustainability and the environment (Cohen & Munoz, 2016; Light & Miskelly, 2015), or used behavioral approaches seeking to understand the determining factors of people's engagement in collaborative consumption (Bocker & Meelen, 2017; Hamari, Sjoklint, & Ukkonen, 2016; Santana & Parigi, 2015).
From a marketing perspective, the sharing economy has spread owing to the internet (Belk, 2014b) and the advancement of other communication and information technologies (Kathan, Matzler, & Veider, 2016), driving the emergence of several companies and categories of new business models (Cohen & Kietzmann, 2014).
Given this diversity in both the thematic approaches and business models emerging within the sharing economy, some studies have tried to provide proper classifications and taxonomies for the phenomenon (Belk, 2014a; Lamberton, 2016; Munoz & Cohen, 2017). However, none of these studies presented a bibliometric work aiming at mapping a given phenomenon or field of knowledge, which is the scope of this research.
2.2 Brief history on bibliometric analysis and its indicators
Araujo (2006) stated that bibliometrics appeared in the beginning of the twentieth century as a symptom of the need to study and to evaluate production activities and scientific communication. A definition that would help to understand its concept was given by Guedes and Borschiver (2005); according to them, bibliometrics is a set of laws and empirical principles that contribute to establishing the theoretical foundations of information science.
Bufrem and Prates (2005) argued that bibliometrics is a part of the measuring mechanism of the production, disclosure and use of information obtained through books or any other production type. Table I presents some important works for the consolidation of bibliometrics in the field of information sciences and the treatment given to the measurement of bibliographic productions.
Pritchard (1969) defined bibliometrics as the application of mathematical and statistical methods for the quantitative evaluation of book content and other means of communication. The original claim of the expression "bibliometrics" is credited to this author (Machado Junior, Souza, Parisotto, & Palmisano, 2016).
As the bibliometrics field evolved, empirical laws were also devised on the behavior of literature, also called bibliometric theories; Araujo (2006) listed them as researchers' productivity law or Lotka's law; scientific knowledge dispersion law or Bradford's law; and word distribution and frequency law in a text or Zipf's law, elaborated in 1926, 1934 and 1949, respectively.
Alvarado (2008) clarified that Lotka's law defines the foundations of the inverse square law, arguing that the number of authors who make "n" contributions in a given scientific field is approximately 1/[n.sup.2] of those who make a single contribution, and that the proportion of those who make a single contribution is about 60 percent or so.
Bradford's law, on the contrary, enables, by measuring the productivity of journals, the establishment of the nucleus and the areas of dispersion on a given subject in the same set of journals (Vanti, 2002), that is, by dividing the production of a given field into zones with equal amounts of published documents, the first zones will have a smaller number of journals; as the following zones are analyzed, there will be more journals in each one of them, denoting the mentioned dispersion.
Zipf's law is, in fact, subdivided into two laws (Costa Santos, 2009): Zipf's first law is related to high-frequency words in a text, and the second law is related to low-frequency words. They were based on empirical observation and analysis of word occurrence frequency in a satisfactorily long text. The premise is that higher frequency words are a sign of the central theme of a textual document.
As Machado Junior et al. (2016) argued, studies that statistically analyze the characteristics of publications (authors, keywords, among others) seek to quantify, describe and predict the written communication process. Communication frequency studies, written over time, identified behavior models that were established in data analysis standards. These standards were instituted in behavior principles, namely, Lotka's Law, Bradford's Law, Zipf's Law and others.
Bufrem and Prates (2005) asserted that these laws have been giving way to more complex analyses, which complement them with the purpose of mapping a certain scientific field by means of sociometric analyses, which will be applied and examined below. Among the main analyses, one may mention the networks of co-authoring, co-citation and bibliographic coupling.
Co-authoring network analysis enables the identification of how researchers, research institutions or countries are connected on the basis of the number of publications they have co-produced (Van Eck & Waltman, 2014). In a co-citation network, two publications are said to be co-cited when there is a third one that refers to them simultaneously (Small, 1973). In other words, the greater the number of papers in which two publications are jointly referred to, the...
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