Investigating the Scientific Outputs of the Field of Viral Marketing in the Web of Science

The purpose of this research is to present a comprehensive picture of the state of scientific activities in the field of marketing and to draw a co-occurrence map of words in scientific articles introduced in the Web of Science database.

The current research is a scientometric type, which was carried out using scientometric indicators and network analysis method. So that by referring to the Web of Science database, the information of 250 degrees in the field of viral marketing was examined. VOSviewer network analysis software was used for data analysis.

After searching, screening and qualitative evaluation of the studies, the final analysis was performed on 250 articles in the period from 2001 to 2021. In-depth analysis of the selected articles showed that the most research in the field of viral marketing is related to 2020 with the number of 49 articles. The United States is the most active country in this field with 75 articles, followed by China and Singapore, respectively, with the highest number of research and communication between authors. Iran is ranked fourteenth. Also, in the evolution of keywords, the primary focus has been on "social media" and "popularity", and in the following years, respectively, the words "word of mouth", "viral marketing", "electronic word of mouth", "Twitter" and "Facebook" has arrived.

Paying attention to the most used and least used countries and researchers through scientometrics can reveal research opportunities and weaknesses in the field of viral marketing and illuminate the horizon for Iranian researchers to shine their results at the international level. According to the results obtained in Iran in the field of viral marketing, although it has superior authors, it has weak points due to communication with other authors.