ECRA co-editors' introduction for volume 9, issue 1, January-February 2010

Publication Type

Editorial

Publication Date

1-2010

Abstract

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Julie Smith-David, Bin Wang, and Chris Westland for their service to Electronic Commerce Research and Applications and to the “Social Networks and Web 2.0” special issue’s development. We appreciated their efforts to develop the current special issue of four articles and some related research commentaries, and the other articles still in process that will appear in subsequent issues of the journal. The special issue received a lot of interest from potential authors, many of whom submitted brief abstracts indicating their intent or full papers for review. We are always disappointed that it is not possible to work with all of the submitting authors to develop their papers. The Special Issue Editors did outstanding work to pick those research papers that were initially submitted that they viewed as having the greatest potential to grow and develop into full-fledged publications, with surprise value, new knowledge and unique findings. We look forward to their next opus!We also would like to take a moment to describe several regular articles that are bundled together with the special issue papers. They cover various ongoing themes that reflect the research presented in this journal, including Web analytics, recommender systems, and electronic payments in e-commerce.The first regular article was written by Jaesung Park, JaeJon Kim, and Joon Koh, and is entitled “Determinants of Continuous Usage Intention in Web Analytics Services.” Outsourced Web analytics services have come increasingly into vogue in the past couple years, and the growth in this area of the market has been a critical element in the provision of support for corporate business intelligence in many countries. The authors of this article conducted research to figure out what drivers most affect the intentions of senior managers to continue to use outsourced Web analytics services. They used survey methods and regression analysis to estimate the relationships in their data. They report that information quality was associated with client firm satisfaction, an important motivator for decisions to continue using the service providers’ Web analytics offerings. Their other main result was related to how firms come to rely and depend upon outsourced Web analytics services. They report that relative value, switching cost, service usage period and satisfaction all were related to dependence on the service provider.The second regular article is titled “Collaborative Filtering Based on Collaborative Tagging to Enhance the Quality of Recommendation.” The authors Heung-Nam Kim, Ae-Ttie Ji, Inay Ha and Geuk-Sik Jo studied how recommender systems can be improved when users are involved in collaborative tagging. Tagging is a means that permits users to express their preferences, and improve the filtering of search information to achieve more effective support for users. They explore two specific settings: one is how to improve collaborative filtering performance when there are only sparse data to work with; and another is the cold-start user problem. The sparse data problem reflects the fact that “even though users are very active, each individual has only expressed a rating (or purchase) on a very small portion of the items. Likewise, very popular items may have been rated by only a few of the total number of users. Accordingly, it is often the case that there is no intersection at all between two users or two items and hence the similarity is not computable at all. Even when the computation of similarity is possible, it may not be very reliable, because of insufficient information processed. A cold-start user, according to the authors, is someone who “joins a collaborative filtering-based recommender system and has presented few opinions,” with the result that “the system is generally unable to make high quality recommendations.” They do empirical experiments with a real-world source of data, Delicious.com (http://www.delicious.com), which offers “tag cloud” capabilities. The authors’ findings show that their algorithm is effective in improving the support of users, and improving the search outcomes for the sparse data and cold-start user settings.The final regular article is “An Empirical Study of Customers’ Perceptions of Security and Trust in E-Payment Systems, by Changsu Kim, Wang Tao, Namchul Kim and Ki-Soo Kim. The authors wrote that it is “commonly believed that good security improves trust, and that the perceptions of good security and trust will ultimately increase the use of electronic commerce. In fact, customers’ perceptions of the security of e-payment systems have become a major factor in the evolution of electronic commerce in markets.” In this research, the authors have studied how 219 South Korean e-commerce consumers view the current state of security in electronic payments. They highlight the drivers of perceived security and perceived trust, and how they antecedents influence the trust that the consumers are willing to place in e-commerce-payment systems. The authors offered both theoretical and practical findings in their article.According to a recent release of information by this journal’s Publisher, Rebecca Wilson, and its Marketing Communication Manager, Rachael Williams at Elsevier, the ‘Impact Factor’ of a journal, published by Thomson-Reuters each year, is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. For example, the ‘2008 Impact Factor’ is defined as citations received in 2008 to all articles published in 2007 and 2006, divided by the number of “source items” published in 2007 and 2006. ECRA’s 2008 Impact Factor, published during Summer 2009 when we wrote this editorial note, was 1.130, up sharply from 0.600 in 2007, a positive development for the journal. This new Impact Factor reflects citations of 136 articles from the journal in 2007 and 292 in 2008. We expect to see further improvements in the future, as more researchers and industry professionals come to recognize the wonderful resources and leading-edge content that the journal is building up over time.There are various ways of assessing a journal. For more information on other journal performance and impact measures, as well as on the Impact Factor itself, the interested reader should consult the following source: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/editorshome.editors/joumeasures. We are pleased to see so much progress in a short period of time. Improving the impact factor of a journal comes through the recognition of the relevance of the contents of a journal’s articles across the related scholarly communities. In ECRA’s case, what is being measured is the impact of this journal among journals in the categories of ‘Computer Science and Information Systems,’ for the most part, although the journal is targeted to an even broader scholarly audience.The senior editorial team of the journal is currently in the process of developing an evaluative process to identify the best journal articles published in ECRA in several categories each year. This is helpful to point interested authors to the best works that appear in the journal, so they can be cited more widely. It also is a good thing for junior and mid-level faculty members to help them to achieve more widespread recognition for the high quality of their best work. We believe that it will make the journal more attractive, in the competitive landscape of current journal publication opportunities too. We have not entirely settled on what the categories will be as of the time this Editors’ Introduction was finalized, however, we are intending to identify several best papers each year, recognizing that the main communities that ECRA serve are Computer Science, Information Systems, Supply Chain Management, Marketing and other interdisciplinary e-commerce research interests. We will provide more information on this in the future, as we work out the details, and consult with representatives of the various constituencies of the journal.Hearty thanks from the Co-Editor team of the journal to the Special Issue Editors once again, and congratulations to everyone on our team who has been making steady contributions to the contents of ECRA, so the journal’s impact factor has come on so strong! We look forward to a good year of published papers in 2010!

Discipline

Computer Sciences

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

Volume

9

Issue

1

First Page

1

Last Page

2

ISSN

1567-4223

Identifier

10.1016/j.elerap.2009.11.003

Publisher

Elsevier

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2009.11.003

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