Hall of fame for mobile commerce and its applications: A bibliometric evaluation of a decade and a half (2000–2015)

• Bibliometric analysis was used to evaluate m-commerce and its applications research.
• USA is leading most of the times, in term of number of publications.
• Some Asian countries have comparable performance to Western countries.
• Asian authors and research institutions have outstanding achievements too.
• Several future directions were offered.

This study intends to evaluate the current development and trends of researches on mobile commerce and its applications through bibliometric analysis. Several publication characteristics were examined, on top of lists for most cited articles on this area and most studied mobile commerce applications. Through the data gathered from Web of Science database, this study employs several measures, namely impact factor, h-index, and citation counts to evaluate the productivity, impact, and research performance of countries, journals, authors, and research institutions. The number of publications are increasing yearly, with USA leading most of the times. Several international collaboration patterns were identified, and surprisingly some Asian countries have comparable performance to Western countries, in terms of the measures employed. Likewise, Asian authors and research institutions are found to have outstanding achievements too. Moreover, both the most studied mobile commerce applications and most cited lists offer some future directions. This study serves as a forerunner in using bibliometric analysis to evaluate researches on mobile commerce and its applications, and expected to benefit researchers in the area of mobile commerce, by identifying potential research directions. In addition, this study also serves as a useful guide to potential researchers and practitioners. However, improvements could be made, if extra analyses, such as content analysis, are added in.