Research Trends in Sustainable E-Payment Systems: A Study Using Topic Modeling Approach

This article analyses research trends in the domain of sustainable e-payment and finds the research gaps therein by applying text mining technique. Abstracts and indexed keywords of 703 research articles on sustainable e-payment have been analyzed by applying the topic modeling approach and the latent Dirichlet allocation technique to narrow down to ten topics. Corresponding number of articles that fall under those topics are determined to address the research gap. Findings reveal disparity in research trends in different aspects of electronic payment. Research and publication in some areas have witnessed appreciable increase in recent years while other topics have remained relatively less explored. Overall, research and publication in the sphere of e-payment show upward trend, especially in recent years. Topics, such as “problems and solutions in e-payments,” “modern statistical analysis tools,” “digitalization of healthcare,” and “secured e-payment technology,” have attracted rigour and interest of the researchers in the domain. In comparison, publications pertaining to topics, such as “cloud-based e-payment system,” “security in electronic payment,” “future of online payment technique,” and “adoptability of digital payment method,” are lesser in numbers. This disparity in research trends in different aspects of electronic payment opens up avenues for a more holistic intellectual exploration of the knowledge domain. Furthermore, the study also finds that the keywords searched in Scopus, number of citations, and name of the publisher act as key factors that impact the popularity of the articles published in this area.