Hotspots,Fronts And Prospects Of Crowdfunding Research Based On Scientific Knowledge Mapping

In recent years,Internet-based finance has been emerging quickly.P2 P,digital currency and third party payment has become new financing models relying on the combination of the finance and internet technology.As one of most advanced financing model,crowdfunding is popular with its novelty unsurprisingly.Scholars of various countries also began to study crowdfunding,crowdfunding research presents different characteristics at home and abroad.Research front is new direction of the specific filed and research focus is the scientific issue discussed by a group of papers during a period of time.However,the research fronts and hotspots of crowdfunding have not been noticed by scholars.In this article,we discuss the research fronts and hotspots of foreign and domestic crowdfunding respectively with the help of scientific knowledge mapping,co-citation analysis,co-words analysis and cluster analysis,we also compare the results of foreign and domestic crowdfunding research in deeply.Firstly,we review the literatures related to crowdfunding research,including the concept of crowdfunding,the factors influencing its success and the participants.Then we review the basic theories and methods of bibliometric in this research.We mainly introduce co-citation theory,cowords theory and their research status,then we illustrate the relationship of knowledge mapping and information visualization,next we describe the concept and traits of knowledge mapping,which include its related research.We also brief the visualization software – Cite Space – systematically.Secondly,we introduce the data resource specifically.The literature data of foreign research are collected from the database of web of science,and the literature data of domestic research are derived from CNKI.We analysis and compare the literature data from three aspects: numbers of papers,the subjects and fields of crowdfunding research.Studies have shown that crowdfunding research in foreign and domestic have the same traits,the number of papers is increasing and maintain good momentum.There are small differences in the number of scholars' output and fewer core scholars.Especially the main institutions of domestic research are emerging,but foreign countries have not yet appeared.As for the fields,crowdfunding can be considered to be an interdisciplinary and synthetic study.Thirdly,we provide detail visualization study about the research hotspots and fronts at home and abroad,the comparison between China and foreign countries are carried out respectively.There are some intersections in the research hotspots of crowdfunding at home and abroad,the scope of domestic research is wide,but it isn't thorough enough.In the analysis of front clusters,Domestic research emphasis on areas of crowdfunding application,and its practice meaning is stronger,which is not obvious in foreign research.Lastly,we summarize the conclusions of this paper.Bases on that,we put forward some suggestions for future development of crowdfunding research.