462846

2012
NMS15510.1177/1461444812462846new media & societyPeng et al.

Article

new media & society

Mapping the landscape of 15(5) 644­–664

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articles 2000–2009

Tai-Quan Peng
Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, China

Lun Zhang
City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Zhi-Jin Zhong
Sun Yat-Sen University, China

Jonathan JH Zhu
City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Abstract
What does ‘Internet studies’ entail as a field of social science research? We aim to answer
the question by mapping research themes, theorization, and methodology of Internet
studies based on 27,000+ articles published in Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts &
Humanities Citation Index journals over the last 10 years. In analyzing the articles, we
adopt a ‘bottom-up’ approach – classifying keywords of the Internet studies without any
a priori categorization – to identify the boundaries, major divisions, and basic elements
of the field talis qualis. The research strategy results in a number of expected, as well
as surprising, patterns and trends. Internet studies have evolved into a viable field that
has witnessed a booming decade. The field is clustered around four primary research
themes: e-Health, e-Business, e-Society, and Human–Technology Interactions. Two or
three sub-themes with different research foci and methodologies emerge within each
theme. The evolution of popular keywords in each sub-theme further shows that the

Corresponding author:
Tai-Quan Peng, Faculty of Humanities and Arts, Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa,
Macau, China.
Email: winsonpeng@gmail.com
Peng et al. 645

field has become more concerned with intricate relationships between Internet use and
specific behaviors/attitudes/effects; Internet usage patterns have increasingly attracted
research attention; and network perspectives and approaches have become popular.
Internet studies in the past decade have been modestly theorized. Established research
methods (e.g., survey, experiment, and content analysis) still prevail in the Internet
studies reviewed.

Keywords
e-business, e-health, e-society, Human–Technology Interactions (HTIs), research
themes

Internet studies involve a wide-ranging agenda of established disciplines, including psy-

chology, sociology, marketing, and communication. To what extent have Internet studies
been engaged in these disciplines? Has Internet studies become an independent field of
study or is it still an interdisciplinary subject area encompassing other fields (Baym,
2005)? Some researchers have debated the disciplinary nature of Internet studies (e.g.,
Hunsinger, 2005; Jones, 2005; Shrum, 2005). However, before addressing the discipli-
nary status of Internet studies, we require systematic and comprehensive information
about this emerging field.
Some efforts have been made to explore the state of art of Internet studies by focusing
on research themes and popular keywords within different timeframes. Kim and Weaver
(2002), Tomasello et al. (2010), and Rice and Fuller (2013) examined the characteristics
of Internet studies within one subject area (communication). Cho and Khang (2006)
expanded the horizon to include studies in three subject areas (i.e., communication,
advertising, and marketing).
Both Kim and Weaver (2002) and Tomasello et al. (2010) found that Internet studies
have become more and more visible in the communication discipline during the respec-
tive timeframes that they have examined. Kim and Weaver (2002) found that law and
policy issues concerning the Internet and use of the Internet were prominent research top-
ics in Internet studies. Tomasello et al. (2010) found that a small set of keyword terms
(i.e., Internet, computer, digital, web/www, and online) was heavily used in the titles of
new media research. More recently, Rice and Fuller (2013) have reviewed the major theo-
retical approaches for studying social aspects of the Internet. They found that the most
frequent global themes in the study of communication and the Internet were social rela-
tions, followed by media implications/use and understanding, participation, societal,
media attributes, and general theory frameworks. By analyzing Internet studies published
in 15 journals in communication, marketing, and advertising between 1994 and 2003, Cho
and Khang (2006) found that there was a definite pattern of increase in Internet studies in
the examined timeframe. The authors observed that ‘Internet usage, perception, and atti-
tude toward the Internet’ (Cho and Khang, 2006: 151) was the most popular topic.
Lievrouw et al. (2001) reviewed research carried out by members of Communication
and Technology (CAT) Division of the International Communication Association and
identified several issues in CAT research as prominent, such as access and equity issues,
flows of information and communication content, and applications of CAT in social
interaction and education. By analyzing the papers presented at the annual conferences
646 new media & society 15(5)

of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in 2003 and 2004, Rice (2005) identi-
fied two dimensions in AoIR research themes: one is the traditional dimension from
general social science research of ‘online/Internet/technology communication/commu-
nity at individual and cultural level’ to specific areas ‘ranging from public/political/user
to development/process/design/knowledge’ (Rice, 2005: 293), and the other is a move-
ment from specific usage and content realms to more general and abstract processes and
concepts.
These reviews thus provide some information for understanding the problems and
opportunities in Internet studies. However, these studies focused on a pre-determined list
of journals or associations, which has obscured the interdisciplinary nature of Internet
studies and which may ‘lead to ordering, memory, familiarity, anchoring, or selection
biases’ (Polites and Watson, 2009: 597). As none of the established disciplines or asso-
ciations can claim that their field is ‘just one academic realm concerned with the Internet’
(Rice, 2005: 286), a ‘bottom-up’ approach (i.e., without any a priori categorization) is
more appropriate for drawing a comprehensive knowledge map for Internet studies.
To fill this gap in the literature, the study aims to map the landscape of Internet studies
without any pre-defined journals or disciplines. This is of particular value for delineating
the boundaries of Internet studies in a larger context and presenting first-hand and quan-
titative understanding of the interactions between Internet studies and other established
disciplines or other emerging fields. Specifically, the following research questions will
be addressed:

RQ1: What is the state of art of Internet studies in general?

RQ2: What are the major themes in Internet studies?
RQ3: What are the popular keywords under each theme of Internet studies?
RQ4: How have these popular keywords evolved over time?
RQ5: What theoretical orientations and research methods are the most popular in
Internet studies?

Methods
The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index
(A&HCI) of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science have been used
to retrieve the data for the study. The data were collected in September 2010. Six query
words (i.e., Internet, web, cyberspace, cyber-space, online, and on-line) were used to
search titles/abstracts/keywords of Internet-relevant articles from 2000 to 2009. Article
language was limited to English, and document type was limited to scholarly journal
articles. Document-level information from 27,340 relevant articles was retrieved, includ-
ing author(s), article title, journal title, abstract, author keywords, and cited references.

Analytical strategy
Firstly, words in abstracts were analyzed to extract research themes from the retrieved
Internet studies. Cluster analysis, which has been applied in business research (e.g.,
Sheppard, 1996) and educational research (e.g., Huberty et al., 2005), is adopted to
Peng et al. 647

analyze the abstracts’ words in order to assign retrieved articles into theme clusters.
Articles in the same theme cluster are more similar to each other than to those in other
theme clusters. Specifically, two-step cluster analysis (Zhang et al., 1996) had been
employed to extract theme clusters from retrieved articles.
To identify popular keywords used in Internet studies, a text-mining approach (‘word
co-occurrence network’ analysis) is adopted to examine which keywords are the most
popular in Internet studies of the past decade. A network linkage between two keywords
is created when they co-occur in a study. The more frequently a keyword co-occurs with
other keywords, the more links the keyword has in the network, and the more popular the
keyword is assumed to be in Internet studies. Due to the fact that different words can be
used to describe the same concept, all words were standardized before processing (e.g.,
plural forms were standardized to their singular forms). The word co-occurrence network
analysis was performed with Wordij 3.0 software (Danowski, 2009).
To explore the evolution of popular keywords in Internet studies, we examine the rise
and fall of the use of selected authors’ keywords during two periods: 2000–2002 and
2007–2009. The occurring frequencies of keywords during the first three-year period
(2000–2002) and the last three-year period (2007–2009) are summed as two composite
scores. According to the change of rank order of the total word frequencies between the
two periods, these keywords are classified into four categories: all-time favorites, rising
stars, fading stars, and peripherals.1 ‘All-time favorites’ refers to keywords that were in
the list of the top 50 frequently used keywords and remained at the same rank percentiles
during both periods; ‘rising stars’ refers to keywords whose rank orders moved up in
2007–2009; ‘fading stars’ refers to keywords that had moved down in rank order in
2007–2009; and ‘peripherals’ refers to keywords whose frequencies of appearance were
not on the top 50 list in either period.

Findings
Overall patterns
To assess whether Internet studies have become a viable field in the social sciences, we
first examine the sheer quantity of relevant research activities (measured by the number
of publications). As reported earlier, we find 27,340 articles on Internet studies in SSCI
and A&HCI journals from 2000 to 2009. Is the volume of research output sufficient for
Internet studies to be considered as a field within the social sciences? We compare it with
the number of publications in four long-standing fields (each represented by a central
keyword of the respective field, including ‘politics’, ‘economy’, ‘society’, and ‘culture’)
and two newer fields (‘globalization/globalisation’ and ‘environment’) in the same data-
bases during the same period of time. As it turns out, ‘Internet’ ranks third among the
seven fields, below ‘environment’ (38,719) and ‘society’ (27,357), but above ‘culture’
(26,937), ‘economy’ (20,596), ‘politics’ (20,165), and ‘globalization’ (7,457). A closer
look at the changes within each of the seven fields reveals that ‘Internet’ has experienced
the second-fastest rate of growth in the last decade, trailing behind ‘environment’ only,
as shown in Figure 1. We recognize that these are crude measures, but they make clear
that Internet studies have witnessed a booming first decade in the 21st century.
648 new media & society 15(5)

8,000

7,000
N of Articles in SSCI/A&HCI

6,000
Environment
5,000 Internet
Society
4,000 Culture
Economy
3,000 Politics
Globalization
2,000

1,000

0
2000 2005 2009
Year of Publication

Figure 1.  Number of publications in Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)/Arts & Humanities
Citation Index (A&HCI) journals with seven central keywords in respective fields.

In the past decade, the Internet has transformed from the media-centric Web 1.0 to the
user-centric Web 2.0. It is informative to explore how responsive Internet researchers have
been to these technological advances. In our 10-year sample, the term ‘Web 2.0’ began to
emerge in 2005. We therefore split the sample into two periods, 2000–2004 and 2005–
2009, and then identified Web 2.0 studies by searching Web 2.0-relevant words (e.g.,
Facebook, Wiki, YouTube, and Twitter) in the titles/abstracts/keywords of the articles. It
turns out that Internet researchers had paid attention to Web 2.0 applications even before
the word ‘Web 2.0’ formally appeared in 2005. Of the sample, 5% of the studies in 2000–
2004 dealt with Web 2.0 applications; the share rose to 9% in 2005–2009. Some earlier
forms of Web 2.0 applications (e.g., search engines, social shopping, instant messaging,
and peer-to-peer technologies) attracted scholarly interests in 2000–2004 and have contin-
ued to do so since 2005. Meanwhile, newer forms of Web 2.0 applications, such as blog-
ging, social networking, wiki, and micro-blogging, have entered the radar screen of Internet
researchers since 2005 and have become increasingly popular topics of Internet studies.

Research themes and popular keywords

Out of 27,340 articles of Internet studies located, 25,685 (94%) included an abstract, from
which we extracted 23,486 unique (i.e., non-duplicated) words for classifying research
themes. The use of particular words in the articles is highly uneven, with some popular
words (e.g., ‘use’, ‘survey’, ‘system’, ‘support’, ‘need’, ‘design’, ‘student’, and ‘process’)
appearing in many articles (up to 14,924), whereas other words (e.g., ‘technofetishism’
and ‘unboundedness’) being unique to only one article. This skewed distribution reflects
a pattern (known as power-law distribution or Zipf’s law) similar to that in the use of
language in daily life (Cancho and Sole, 2003; Zipf, 1949) and other academic writings
(Chen et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2010).
Peng et al. 649

The finding that the use of words in Internet studies follows a power-law distribution
suggests that we could classify the articles based on a small set of the most commonly
used words without losing much information in the rest of the words. After discarding
our search query words (i.e., ‘Internet’, ‘online’, ‘web’, ‘cyberspace’ and their variants)
and non-discriminant words (e.g., ‘study’ and ‘paper’), we came up a list of the 1,885
most commonly found words. Each of the 1,885 common words is used in at least 50
articles. Put differently, all 25,685 articles contain at least one of the common words and
90% of the articles include at least 24 common words. We use the 1,885 words as cluster-
ing variables to assign the 25,685 studies into different theme clusters.
Two rounds of two-step cluster analysis were performed. In the first round, four pri-
mary theme clusters (e-Health, e-Business,2 e-Society,2 and HTIs) were produced, each
accounting for 27%, 18%, 21%, and 34% of the sample, respectively. In the second
round, a separate cluster analysis was performed within each primary cluster for further
decomposition, generating eleven secondary clusters or sub-themes of smaller size and
more homogenous content, including two within e-Health (‘Generic Applications’ and
‘Specific Behaviors’), three within e-Business (‘Acceptance Studies’, ‘Management
and Internet’, and ‘Marketing and Internet’), three within e-Society (‘Social Interactions
and Internet’, ‘Law/Policy and Internet’, and ‘Communication and Internet’), and three
within HTIs (‘Psychological Processing and Internet’, ‘Web Search/e-Library’, and
‘e-Learning’). The structure and relative share of the four primary themes and eleven
sub-themes are reported in Figure 2.
While we will further elaborate in the following sections the research themes and sub-
themes, two surprising observations are in order here. Firstly, mainstream social scien-
tists probably will not expect e-Health to emerge as a unique and prominent theme; as
such, a conventional literature review will not be able to detect its existence. Secondly,
Internet studies are not divided along the disciplinary boundaries of social sciences, such
as sociology, political science, economics, public administration, etc.; instead, the stud-
ies scatter around key issues such as interactions, communication, and regulation.
To discover popular keywords under each research sub-theme, a ‘co-occurrence net-
work analysis’ was performed to extract useful knowledge structure from large collec-
tions of author’s keywords of journal articles (Cohen et al., 2005). After excluding 184
commonly used English words,3 11,778 unique words were extracted from the keywords
provided by the original authors of the retrieved articles. Eleven co-occurrence networks
were constructed based on the paired presence of keywords in articles of 11 sub-themes.
The characteristics of these 11 co-occurrence networks are summarized in Table 1.

E-health.  Of the top 20 most frequently occurring keywords in networks of two sub-themes
in e-Health, seven keywords in ‘e-Health: Generic Applications’ (‘health’, ‘care’, ‘nurs-
ing’, ‘patient’, ‘cancer’, ‘medical’, and ‘nurse’) are about health; and six in ‘e-Health:
Specific Behaviors’ (‘health’, ‘sexual’, ‘disorder’, ‘depression’, ‘intervention’, and ‘alco-
hol’) are related to health, after excluding Internet-relevant buzzwords (e.g., Internet,
online, information, research, and technology) in the co-occurrence networks.
In the two sub-themes of e-Health, different research foci emerge when we examined
the most frequently used keyword pairs in the two clusters. The research foci of ‘e-Health:
Generic Applications’ include: (1) generic applications of the Internet in healthy con-
texts, such as health care, home nursing, public health, mental health, and community
 650
new media & society 15(5)

Figure 2.  Family tree of research themes and sub-themes of Internet studies (N = 25,685).
Peng et al. 651

Table 1.  Characteristics of keyword co-occurrence networks of 11 research sub-themes.

Research theme: sub-theme  Number of Number of Network Nodes degree

unique words unique word clustering
pairs coefficients Median Minimum Maximum

e-Health: Generic 2,709 23,564 0.64 6 2 726

Applications
e-Health: Specific Behaviors 3,365 28,971 0.62 6 2 982
e-Business: Acceptance 1,597 13,497 0.66 6 2 424
Studies
e-Business: Management and 2,066 17,447 0.64 6 2 584
Internet
e-Business: Marketing and 2,176 17,066 0.62 6 1 470
Internet
e-Society: Social Interactions 3,124 20,546 0.64 6 1 833
and Internet
e-Society: Law/Policy and 2,196 14,791 0.63 6 1 596
Internet
e-Society: Communication 1,262 4,822 0.69 5 0 338
and Internet
Human–Technology 1,870 11,698 0.61 6 2 268
Interactions:
Psychological Processing and
Internet
Human–Technology 2,718 21,702 0.64 6 0 704
Interactions:
Web Search/e-Library
Human–Technology 2,920 28,729 0.67 6 1 1,023
Interactions:
e-Learning

health; and (2) generic applications of the Internet to improve health services, care qual-
ity, and nursing quality and to provide education and information for patients. The
research spotlight of ‘e-Health: Specific Behaviors’ is on the relationships between the
Internet and specific behaviors among specific groups of individuals. Those behaviors
include Internet addiction, sexual behavior, alcohol use, and smoking behavior. Specific
groups of individuals constituting the research subjects include, but are not limited to,
college students, adolescents, men, and HIV carriers.

E-business.  After excluding the Internet-relevant buzzwords, keywords most frequently

co-occurring with other keywords in networks of three sub-themes in e-Business are
about business issues (‘e-commerce’, ‘consumer’, ‘service’, ‘management’, ‘market’,
‘marketing’, ‘chain’, ‘auction’, ‘price’, and ‘pricing’).
Out of three e-Business sub-themes, consumers’ acceptance of online shopping and
the role of trust in consumers’ acceptance of e-commerce are two prominent research
topics of ‘e-Business: Acceptance Studies’. Supply chain management in e-commerce
and customer services in e-commerce are two popular topics in ‘e-Business: Management
652 new media & society 15(5)

and Internet’. Studies in ‘e-Business: Marketing and Internet’ focus on auction/bidding

in e-commerce and pricing mechanisms in e-commerce.

E-society.  Keywords most frequently co-occurring with other keywords in networks of

three sub-themes in e-Society are about social science issues (‘social’, ‘network’,
‘media’, ‘communication’, ‘community’, ‘public’, ‘identity’, ‘culture’, ‘policy’, and
‘development’).
Among three e-Society sub-themes, the popular keyword pairs of ‘e-Society: Social
Interactions and Internet’ are online/virtual community, social capital/social community,
social identity, and political participation. The popular keywords in ‘e-Society: Law/
Policy and Internet’ include digital divide, governments’ policies towards the Internet,
and information privacy and security. The popular topics of ‘e-Society: Communication
and Internet’ are individuals’ communication behaviors on the Internet.

Human–Technology Interactions.  The three sub-themes in HTIs emphasize applications of

the Internet as a technological platform in three different settings. After excluding the
Internet-relevant buzzwords, keywords most frequently co-occurring with other key-
words in network of ‘HTI: Psychological Processing and Internet’ are those about psy-
chological processing (‘memory’, ‘visual’, ‘comprehension’, ‘attention’, ‘perception’,
and ‘ERP’); those keywords in the network of ‘HTI: Web Search/e-Library’ are termi-
nologies in computer science and library science (‘search’, ‘retrieval’, ‘database’,
‘design’, ‘engine’, ‘library’, ‘document’, and ‘system’); and those keywords in the net-
work of ‘HTI: e-Learning’ are concepts about learning (‘learning’, ‘education’, ‘e-learn-
ing’, ‘teaching’, ‘student’, ‘instruction’, and ‘teacher’).
Motor control, language processing, and memory processing are three popular key-
word pairs in ‘HTI: Psychological Processing and Internet’. Information retrieval, digital
library, and knowledge management are three prevalent topics in ‘HTI: Web Search/e-
Library’. Web-based/distance learning and interactive/cooperative/collaborative learn-
ing are popular keywords in ‘HTI: e-Learning’.

Evolution of popular keywords

To examine the evolution of popular keywords in different sub-themes of Internet stud-
ies, we developed a typology to classify keywords of Internet studies into four catego-
ries: all-time favorites, rising stars, fading stars, and peripherals.
Internet studies in the 11 sub-themes have been dominated by a small set of all-time
favorite keywords during 2000–2009, while most of the keywords are in the peripheral
area. Moreover, different sub-themes vary in the sustainability of popular keywords. The
percentages of all-time favorites in the three e-Business sub-themes are higher than those
in the other eight sub-themes, implying that researchers have developed a set of sustain-
ably shared interests in these three sub-themes. The percentages of rising stars and fading
stars in ‘e-Society: Communication and Internet’ are substantially higher than those in
other sub-themes, suggesting that research topics in this sub-theme come and go at a
faster pace than those in other sub-themes.
Although these all-time favorites, rising stars, and fading stars are categories of dis-
crete words, some general trends can be observed. Firstly, Internet studies have become
Peng et al. 653

more concerned with intricate relationships between the Internet and specific behaviors/
attitudes/effects among specific research subjects. Secondly, although ‘acceptance stud-
ies’ remained a popular topic over the past decade, studies on Internet usage patterns
have grown in popularity in recent years. Thirdly, contextualizing Internet studies in a
network perspective is either an all-time practice or a promising trend for the future.
In ‘e-Health: Generic Applications’, researchers demonstrate consistent interest in
applications of the Internet in health information acquisition and in nursing and care.
Moreover, researchers have become increasingly interested in adoption of the Internet
among specific groups of people (e.g., cancer patients, nurses, and children) and in spe-
cific healthy settings (e.g., training, therapy, and learning). In ‘e-Health: Specific
Behaviors’, relationships between the Internet and sexual behavior, alcohol behavior,
and smoking behavior have attracted more research attention over time, while Internet-
related addiction phenomena has declined in popularity.
In three e-Business sub-themes, e-commerce was a shared all-time favorite keyword in
the past decade. In ‘e-Business: Acceptance Studies’, trust, satisfaction, intention, loyalty,
and decision are ‘rising star’ keywords. Interestingly, ‘use’ emerges as a rising star and
‘acceptance’ is a fading star in this sub-theme, suggesting that acceptance studies have
entered into a post-acceptance era focusing more on consumers’ post-adoption behaviors.
In ‘e-Business: Management and Internet’, network, mobile, satisfaction, and security have
become popular keywords in recent years. In ‘e-Business: Marketing and Internet’, auc-
tion, pricing, competition, and bidding are four all-time favorite keywords, whereas game,
channel, choice, advertising, and retailing became rising stars in 2000–2009.
In three e-Society sub-themes, ‘social’ is a shared all-time favorite keywords. In
‘e-Society: Social Interactions and Internet’, culture, globalization, sociology, and power
have begun fading away, while network, identity, discourse, blog, news, politics, and
relation have become more visible since 2007. In ‘e-Society: Law/Policy and Internet’,
network and community, as well as security, divide, and risk issues about the Internet and
e-government, have also grown in popularity; while regulation, development, and capital
have lost their initial prevalence. In ‘e-Society: Communication and Internet’, law issues
about the Internet have become less popular, along with journalism and e-commerce,
while broadband, gambling, advertising, and game have grown in popularity over time.
In ‘HTI: Psychological Processing and Internet’, visual, prime, cognitive, ambiguity,
acquisition, and semantics have become more visible in 2007–2009, while attention,
performance, and response have begun to lose their prevalence. In ‘HTI: Web Search/e-
Library’, researchers paid more attention to users and semantics/language/text in 2007–
2009; while database, software, and navigation appear less and less frequently. In ‘HTI:
e-Learning’, e-learning has become an ad hoc keyword among researchers, while
evaluation and assessment are two all-time favorite keywords.

Theoretical orientations and research methods

Our final research question is that of the theoretical orientations and research methods in
Internet studies. Firstly, we assess the theoretical orientation (or lack of it) of the studies
based on the most frequently used references in Internet studies.4 The results are reported
in Table 2.
 654

Table 2.  Theoretical orientation of Internet studies.

Overall e-Health e-Business e-Society Human–Technology Interactions
pattern
Generic Specific Acceptance Management Marketing Social Law/ Communication Psychological Web Search/ e-Learning
Applications Behaviors Studies and Internet and Internet Interactions Policy and and Internet Processing e-Library
and Internet Internet and Internet

% of the Internet 31% 11% 28% 77% 41% 37% 43% 27% 27% 31% 23% 28%
studies considered
to be theoretically
oriented (i.e.,
citing theoretical
references)
Theoretical  
domain
Diffusion 20% 11% 13% 65% 29% 6% 18% 25% 19% 3% 7% 15%
Use 29% 5% 14% 59% 25% 40% 23% 20% 29% 26% 43% 35%
Effects 28% 17% 24% 47% 16% 6% 62% 33% 37% 14% 9% 36%
Use and effects 18% 6% 19% 24% 13% 5% 20% 14% 16% 28% 4% 34%
Structure and  7% 1% 1% 2% 6% 3% 23% 20% 18% 1% 10% 4%
content
Business models 15% 1% 1% 40% 48% 64% 7% 11% 16% 1% 3% 2%
Regulation  1% 0% 0% 2% 1% 0% 3% 10% 4% 0% 0% 0%
Technical  4% 1% 1% 4% 5% 1% 4% 6% 4% 2% 12% 4%
Non-Internet  7% 6% 5% 4% 3% 1% 13% 7% 4% 32% 3% 9%
new media & society 15(5)
Peng et al. 655

Only about 30% of Internet studies cite one or more theoretical references, suggesting
that Internet studies in the past decade were modestly theorized. However, different sub-
themes vary substantially. Studies in e-Business sub-themes are the most theoretically
oriented, followed by those in e-Society and HTI. Internet studies in e-Health are the
least theoretically driven.
Interestingly, a few theoretical domains are popular across the research sub-themes.
As shown in Table 2, the studies in most of the sub-themes cite references in the domains
of Diffusion, Use, and Effects. In addition, studies in e-Business are more likely to cite
theories of Internet Business Models, the studies in e-Society are more likely to draw on
theories of structure and content of the Internet, and the studies in ‘HTI: Web Search/e-
Library’ are more likely to follow technical theories of the Internet.
To understand what methods were used in Internet studies in the past decade, we have
randomly drawn a sub-sample from the data, with 100 studies from each of the 11 sub-
themes, and then have coded manually the methods employed in these studies. The cod-
ing result is summarized in Table 3. Generally speaking, quantitative approach, employed
by 59% of the sub-sample, dominated Internet studies in the past decade. Qualitative
approach and other approaches (e.g., system evaluation, algorithm development, and
policy discussions) account for 19% and 11%, respectively. Of quantitative methods,
survey, experiment, and content analysis were the most frequently used, whereas case
study and in-depth interviews/focus groups were the most commonly used qualitative
methods. It is worth noting that 5% of the sub-samples did not involve any explicit
method, quantitative or qualitative, as there is no empirical test or evaluation in the
studies. Another 5% are reviews that assess the history, current status, or future of
Internet-related issues.
The Internet studies in different sub-themes differ from each other in the diversity of
research methods used. The studies in e-Society are the most heterogeneous in research
methods, with no single method playing a clear-cut leading role in any of the sub-themes.
On the other hand, four other sub-themes are highly homogenous, including ‘e-Health:
Specific Behaviors’ and ‘e-Business: Acceptance Studies’, both of which heavily rely on
surveys; ‘e-Business: Marketing and Internet’, which concentrates on econometrics,
experiment, and field data; and ‘HTI: Psychological Processing and Internet’, which
focuses on experiment research. Overall, the established social science research methods
are well present among the Internet studies reviewed. However, newer methods of data
collection, such as web content mining and user traffic records, are infrequently used to
study the new medium.

Conclusion and discussion

To map the landscape of Internet studies, the study has adopted a ‘bottom-up’ approach
(i.e., without any a priori categorization) to analyze social sciences journal articles on the
Internet published in 2000–2009. The findings of the study advance our understanding of
the research themes, theorization, and methodology of Internet studies in a comprehen-
sive and quantitative way.
Firstly, Internet studies have developed into a substantial field in terms of number of
studies published in the past decade, contrary to Herring’s (2004) speculations about a
 656

Table 3.  Research methods of Internet studies.

Methods employed Overall e-Health e-Business e-Society Human–Technology Interactions
  Pattern
Generic Specific Acceptance Management Marketing Social Law/ Communication Psychological Web e-Learning
Applications Behaviors Studies and Internet and Internet Interactions Policy and and Internet Processing Search/
and Internet Internet and Internet e-Library

Theoretical 5% 0% 2% 1% 15% 3% 4% 12% 7% 0% 2% 7%

development
Review 5% 13% 2% 2% 10% 1% 0% 5% 7% 3% 10% 7%
Quantitative approach  
Survey 23% 35% 59% 71% 16% 8% 19% 13% 13% 3% 9% 23%
Experiment 15% 9% 25% 19% 6% 16% 1% 4% 6% 78% 19% 17%
Content analysis 6% 4% 3% 0% 3% 2% 14% 8% 15% 0% 7% 5%
Field data (e.g., client/ 5% 7% 0% 2% 7% 14% 3% 1% 2% 5% 11% 2%
server log-files and diary)
Econometrics 5% 0% 0% 2% 5% 32% 0% 0% 1% 0% 0% 0%
Simulation 2% 0% 0% 0% 1% 10% 0% 0% 1% 0% 1% 0%
Analyzing published data/ 2% 0% 0% 1% 2% 4% 3% 6% 4% 0% 0% 0%
statistics
Others 1% 0% 0% 1% 3% 2% 1% 0% 3% 0% 1% 1%
Subtotal 59% 56% 88% 96% 41% 88% 41% 33% 46% 86% 49% 48%
Qualitative approach  
Case study 8% 7% 0% 0% 12% 2% 5% 13% 12% 0% 14% 12%
In-depth interview/focus 5% 13% 7% 0% 6% 0% 9% 7% 6% 0% 1% 14%
group
Cultural/critical studies 3% 0% 0% 0% 1% 0% 18% 1% 4% 0% 1% 0%

(Continued)
new media & society 15(5)
 Peng et al.

Table 3. (Continued)

Methods employed Overall e-Health e-Business e-Society Human–Technology Interactions

  Pattern
Generic Specific Acceptance Management Marketing Social Law/ Communication Psychological Web e-Learning
Applications Behaviors Studies and Internet and Internet Interactions Policy and and Internet Processing Search/
and Internet Internet and Internet e-Library

Field observation/ 2% 2% 2% 1% 2% 0% 7% 1% 2% 0% 0% 0%
ethnography
Text/semiotic/discourse 2% 2% 0% 0% 1% 0% 7% 4% 6% 0% 0% 2%
analysis
Subtotal 19% 24% 8% 1% 21% 2% 47% 26% 30% 0% 16% 28%
Others  
System evaluation/ 5% 0% 0% 0% 7% 4% 1% 3% 1% 11% 20% 9%
Algorithm development
Policy/regulation 3% 2% 0% 0% 2% 2% 2% 16% 7% 0% 0% 0%
discussions
Miscellaneous 2% 6% 0% 0% 3% 1% 4% 5% 2% 0% 3% 2%
Subtotal 11% 7% 0% 0% 12% 7% 7% 24% 10% 11% 23% 11%
657
658 new media & society 15(5)

demise of Internet studies. Journal articles on the Internet have demonstrated a dramatic
increase in the past decade, with an average growth rate of 13%. Secondly, Internet stud-
ies can be clustered around four primary research themes: e-Health, e-Business, e-Society,
and HTIs. This finding seems to support the argument that ‘specific genres of Internet
studies seem to fairly easily domesticate into existing university rubrics’ (Baron, 2005:
270). However, research sub-themes and popular keywords emerging within primary
themes suggest that Internet studies cannot perfectly fit into established disciplines. For
example, the second sub-theme of e-Health, which focuses on the relationship between
the Internet and specific behaviors, can be a concern of sociologists, psychiatrists, com-
munication scholars, and political scientists. Therefore, we argue that Internet studies are
a melting pot that attracts researchers from different disciplines to transcend their disci-
plinary boundaries to develop new theoretical, methodological, and practical concerns.

Future trends in Internet studies: Usage studies and network

perspectives
The study empirically confirms the taken-for-granted statement that adoption, use, and
effects of the Internet have been investigated among individuals (i.e., either among the
general public or among individuals with certain characteristics), organizations (e.g.,
commercial organizations, healthy organizations, and education institutions), and the
society. Adoption has received the most extensive examination, which has developed
into a unique sub-theme (e-Business: Acceptance Studies) in Internet studies. Effect
studies are also extensively conducted in every sub-theme, which is consistent with the
observation that ‘there is no social science discipline that does not study the effects of the
Internet’ (Walther, 2010: 489).
The most under-developed field in the past decade is usage studies, which is expected
to become more prominent in the near future, as shown by the occurrence of ‘use’ or
‘user’ as rising stars of keywords in several sub-themes of Internet studies. The increas-
ing popularity of Web 2.0 studies will catalyze the development of usage studies in
Internet studies. This pattern has recurred in media studies – the earliest publications just
expressed concerns or enthusiasms for the new medium, whereas later studies became
more realistic and focused less on effects and more on how the medium is used, because
‘technology is not independent of context (users, situation, economics, etc.) nor is it
“neutral” in relation to those who design, implement, and use it’ (Fulk and Gould, 2009:
764). To better understand individuals’ behavioral pattern on the Internet, it is necessary
to unpack or decompose general Internet use into use of specific features of the Internet
(Baym, 2009; Fulk and Gould, 2009; Walther et al., 2005) and examine how Internet
users interact with each other using different features (e.g., blogging, photo-sharing,
video-sharing) offered at multiple platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon,
Flickr). More importantly, researchers should go beyond technical features and uncover
the underlying communicative processes these surface features of technologies serve, as
this can help recognize ‘common cause with researchers working on broader domains
and theories of communication’ (Parks, 2009: 725).
Another noticeable trend is the increasing popularity of a network perspective in
Internet studies, which is well illustrated by the fact that network/community has become
Peng et al. 659

a rising star among keywords in six sub-themes of Internet studies. This trend embodies
a research paradigm shift brought about by the Internet. In the past, agents using the
Internet (i.e., individuals, groups, or organizations) were considered either ‘senders’ or
‘receivers’ of information. However, network perspective ‘entails both aspects of com-
munication simultaneously according to communicators’ contexts, meanings, and pur-
poses’ (Lievrouw et al., 2001: 287). The old criticism that network studies were ‘merely
descriptive’ or ‘just methodological pieces’ is no longer tenable. Nowadays, network
perspectives are a rich resource of explanations for social phenomena in a wide variety
of disciplines (Borgatti et al., 2009). Network perspectives can be applied to examine the
structure of the Internet itself (e.g., Zhu et al., 2008), and to examine the structure of
communication (e.g., Panzarasa et al., 2009) and social networks (e.g., Chau and Xu,
2007) formed over the Internet. The Internet, which was originally characterized a net-
work of networks (Berners-Lee, 1999), provides a platform to falsify, test, and/or develop
different network theories/perspectives.

Theorization to be enhanced and methods to be innovated

Internet studies have been criticized as trailing the development of technologies without
taking serious consideration of the theoretical implications of technical features (Walther
et al., 2005). Our work empirically shows that (1) Internet studies in some sub-themes
(e.g., e-Society: Communication and Internet) demonstrate less sustainability concern-
ing popular keywords than Internet studies in other themes; (2) Internet studies over the
past decade have generally been only modestly theorized; and (3) Internet studies in
different sub-themes vary substantially in the extent of theorization.
It is understandable that researchers trace emerging Internet applications, because this
can provide useful heuristic information for sophisticated studies. Nevertheless, a better
response to rapid technological development is to draw on theories and models to iden-
tify and understand emerging technologies and their users (Scott, 2009). We agree with
the argument of Rice and Fuller (2013) that Internet researchers should balance breadth
and depth in theorization.
Firstly, in terms of breadth in theorization, researchers affiliated in one field should
look outside to connect their studies with broader theoretical frameworks available in
other fields. In our work, Internet studies in each sub-theme share theories concerning
three domains (diffusion, use, and effects). These shared theoretical domains can help
researchers interested in various research themes or topics to exchange views and per-
haps collaborate with one another. However, the shared theoretical approaches need to be
broadened to include domains beyond just diffusion–use–effects domains.
One possible and promising theoretical domain might be the structure and content of
the Internet. The popularity of Web 2.0 and the semantic web has made issues of the struc-
ture and content of the Internet more prominent in Internet studies across different sub-
themes. For example, how do consumers interact with each other by posting comments at
eBay or Amazon? How do cancer patients interact with each other on Facebook to form a
network, and what are the characteristics of the network? How do students in universities
interact with professors via Twitter or Facebook? Theories in the domain of Structure and
Content could help researchers address these interesting questions efficiently.
660 new media & society 15(5)

Secondly, with regard to the depth of theorization, researchers should try to identify
the triggering or boundary conditions of theories (i.e., how, and under what conditions,
cause–outcome relationships can take place) (Walther, 2010). Studies in three e-Business
sub-themes did this. In these studies, some classical theories, such as the Theory of
Reasoned Action (TRA; Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980) and the Theory of Planned Behavior
(TPB; Ajzen, 1991), have often been applied as theoretical frameworks to address
Internet-relevant issues. Nevertheless, these applications were not simply replications of
the theories in the context of the Internet, but had ‘been stretched, reboundaried, and
expanded’ (Walther et al., 2005: 651) to identify some niche variables to explain Internet-
related behaviors or to discover some moderating variables that can condition their
explanatory power. For example, some new factors have been incorporated into the TRA
or Technology Acceptance Model (TAM, see Davis et al., 1989) to explain the adoption
of the Internet or specific applications, such as playfulness (Moon and Kim, 2001), trust
and perceived risk (Pavlou, 2003), and product involvement (Koufaris, 2003).
Although Internet studies are a domain ‘plagued by the notion that everything is
new’ (Baym, 2009: 720), methods employed in Internet studies are not so innovative,
and traditional social science research methods (i.e., survey, experiment, and content
analysis) remain dominant. These traditional methods have played and will continue to
play significant roles in Internet studies. However, in addition to these, the rise of user-
centered studies and network perspectives in Internet studies calls for innovative
research tools. Nowadays, the development of information technologies has made ‘tera-
bytes of data describing minute-by-minute interactions and locations of entire popula-
tions of individuals’ (Lazer et al., 2009: 722) accessible to Internet researchers, allowing
them to describe, explain, and predict Internet users’ online behavioral pattern in a more
reliable manner. Web 2.0 technologies have provided golden opportunities to ‘capture,
tag, and manifest high-resolution high-fidelity relational metadata’ (Contractor, 2009:
744), which can help us understand the structure of complex social networks and
explore the mechanisms driving the evolution of those networks.

Limitations and future direction

The present study is limited by the quality of abstracts and keywords used to extract
research themes and to identify popular keywords of Internet studies. We certainly can-
not claim that abstracts and keywords of all journal articles included in the study per-
fectly convey the themes or foci of the articles concerned. However, the journals listed
in the two databases (i.e., SSCI and AandHCI) are top journals in their subject categories.
We are confident that the abstracts and keywords of articles published in these journals
are of adequate quality for analysis.
Although four primary themes and eleven sub-themes emerge for Internet studies in
the study, it is necessary to emphasize that these themes are not mutually exclusive, but in
fact overlap each other. Our analysis of the evolution of popular keywords in each sub-
theme provides some evidence for this type of inter-theme overlap. However, this evi-
dence is far from adequate. It is theoretically significant to explore inter-theme interaction
in Internet studies to examine how these research themes co-evolve with each other.
Peng et al. 661

The study also suffers from the so-called ‘file drawer effect’. Although the study ana-
lyzes a large volume of Internet studies, it does not exhaust all. One neglected source is
those studies presented at various conferences, of which only a small proportion is pub-
lished in the journals listed in the two databases of ISI. It would be informative to com-
pare research themes of Internet studies between conference proceedings and journal
articles in the future.

Acknowledgements
We thank Hai Liang, Heng Lu, Jie Qin, Chengjun Wang, and Zhenzhen Wang for their advice on
the study, Xiyue Cao for her assistance in data collection, and anonymous reviewers and editors of
this special issue for their insightful comments.

Funding
This study has been funded by Strategic Research Grant (7002652) from City University of Hong
Kong.

Notes
1. The typology is developed according to the change of rank order of summated words occur-
ring frequency in two periods, as shown in the table below.

Rank order of occurring frequencies (2007–2009)

  1–10 11–30 31–50 51 or above
Rank order of 1–10 All-time Fading star Fading star Fading star
occurring frequencies favorite
(2000–2002)  11–30 Rising star All-time favorite Fading star Fading star
  31–50 Rising star Rising star All-time favorite Fading star
  51 or above Rising star Rising star Rising star Peripherals

2. Initially, e-Society and e-Business were grouped together in one big cluster (39% of the
sample) with the largest number of secondary clusters (six). Based on the clear-cut division
between the three secondary clusters of e-Business and e-Society and the findings from
subsequent co-occurrence network analysis (see the next section), we split e-Business and
e-Society into two primary clusters.
3. For a list of these 184 English words, please visit https://github.com/jdf/cue.language/blob/
master/src/cue/lang/stop/english.
4. Briefly, we have manually coded 35 references that are most frequently cited in each of the 11
sub-themes (i.e., a total of 357 references examined), defining the references as ‘theoretically
oriented’ if one or more theoretical perspectives are explicitly present in the reference. We
then have coded the domains of the theoretical perspectives and have mapped the resulting
theoretical orientations and theoretical domains of all the studies that cite the 357 references.
Since some references are heavily cited in more than one cluster, the total number of coded
references is less than 385 (35 × 11 = 385).
662 new media & society 15(5)

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Author biographies
Tai-Quan Peng is an Assistant Professor in Faculty of Humanities and Arts, Macau
University of Science and Technology, Macau. Email: winsonpeng@gmail.com.
664 new media & society 15(5)

Lun Zhang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Web Mining Lab, Department of Media
and Communication, City University of Hong Kong. Email: zhanglun1525@gmail.com.

Zhi-Jin Zhong is an Associate Professor at School of Communication and Design, Sun

Yat-Sen University, China. Email: sophiazhonghk@gmail.com.

Jonathan JH Zhu is a Professor and Founding Director of Web Mining Lab in Department
of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong. Email: j.zhu@cityu.edu.hk.