Consumer Behavior in Electronic Word of Mouth: A Bibliometric Approach

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) is a consumer behavior that involves the dissemination of communications about brands, products, and companies with clear positive or negative valence. eWOM is attracting great attention from academics and practitioners, which is reflected in the growing number of publications on the subject. Thus, the present study aims to contribute to the organization and description of this knowledge through the use of bibliometric techniques. This study analyzes a documentary corpus of 2,331 eWOM documents existing in the Scopus database. The descriptive analysis of this body of documents confirms a rapid growth in the pace of publication. The data further highlight eWOM as a multidisciplinary academic field with a center of gravity in business, management, and accounting. However, the analysis shows a great predominance of institutions and researchers from developed and emerging countries. The analysis of the co-occurrence of terms leads to the identification of three thematic clusters: (1) search and use of eWOM by the consumer, (2) the consumer’s experience and satisfaction in the consumption of services, and (3) the consumer behavior in the generation of eWOM. The analysis of the overlay visualization of terms allows us to verify an evolution in research interest from the orientation to lay the theoretical foundations of eWOM to the current interest in delving into search behavior and the use of eWOM in decision making. Finally, the present study formulates the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.