Information Systems Research Vol. 21, No. 4, December 2010, pp. 983–999 issn 1047-7047  eissn 1526-5536  10  2104  0983 inf orms ® doi 10.1287/isre.1080.0227 ©2010 INFORMS Research Note Mapping the Field of Virtual Work: A Cocitation Analysis Sumita Raghuram Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, raghuram@psu.edu Philipp Tuertscher Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Vienna University of Economics and Business, 1090 Vienna, Austria, philipp.tuertscher@wu-wien.ac.at Raghu Garud Smeal College of Business, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, rgarud@psu.edu I nterest in the area of virtual work continues to increase with articles being written from different disciplinary perspectives—e.g., information systems (IS), management, psychology, and transportation. In this paper, we map research on virtual work to (a) understand the intellectual base from which this field has emerged, (b) explore how this field has evolved over time, and (c) identify clusters of research themes that have emerged over time and the relationships between them. Specifically, we use cocitation analysis of research published in all social science disciplines to map the field at three points in time—1995, 2000, and 2006. Our results show thatthefieldhasgrownfrom9researchclustersin1995to16in2006.Acomparisonacrossthesemapssuggests that research in the cluster of “virtual teams” has gained significance even as research in some earlier clus- ters such as “urban planning and transportation” has lost ground. Our longitudinal analysis identifies relevant concepts, theories, and methodologies that have emerged in the field of virtual work. This analysis can help interested researchers identify how they may want to contribute to the field of virtual work—by adding to popular clusters, by enriching emerging smaller clusters, or by acting as bridges across clusters. Key words : virtual work; virtual teams; bibliometric analysis History : Vallabh Sambamurthy, Senior Editor; Katherine Stewart, Associate Editor. This paper was received on May 31, 2007, and was with the authors 7.5 months for 2 revisions. Published online in Articles in Advance June 12, 2009. With advances in information technology, “virtual work” in the form of global virtual teams, telecom- muting, and distributed work is now being embraced bymostorganizations(TheTeleworkAdvisoryGroup 2007). Reasons for its growing popularity range from productivity gains that can be realized from such a work mode to an ability to harness talent that lies distributed across time and space (Gajendran and Harrison 2007, Raghuram et al. 2001). Consequently, it is not surprising that academicians from disciplines as diverse as information systems (IS), management, psychology, and transportation have become inter- ested in researching this new work form. Howcanwetapintotheinsightsthatthesediverse literatures have to offer? Unfortunately, this is not a straightforward task. Given its multifaceted nature, there are several meanings associated with the term “virtualwork.”Forinstance,termssuchascomputer- mediatedwork,telecommuting,anddistributedwork all have a bearing on our understanding of this new workmode.Giventhisproliferationofterms,itisdif- ficult to identify the connections across the different contributions and to take full advantage of the accu- mulated knowledge. To address these issues, we use IS tools to conduct a bibliometric study to map the field of virtual work. This approach allows us to uncover underlying con- nections between the contributions on virtual work fromdifferentdisciplines.Scientificresearchisasocial activity with researchers building on the efforts and 983 INFORMS holds copyright to this article and distributed this copy as a courtesy to the author(s). Additional information, including rights and permission policies, is available at http://journals.informs.org/.