2-4 February 2015- Istanbul, Turkey Proceedings of INTCESS15- 2 nd International Conference on Education and Social Sciences 321 ISBN: 978-605-64453-2-3 AN ANALYSIS OF E-BUSINESS RESEARCH TOPICS Semen Son Turan Asst. Prof. Dr., MEF University, TURKEY, semen.son@mef.edu.tr Abstract Due to its interdisciplinary nature and its pace in penetrating into various facets of everyday activities, e- business has become an increasingly popular topic over the last two decades. While early 1990s e-business research grounded in ICT (information communication technology) theories covered topics such as, internal systems capabilities, adoption, and technology investments’ impact on success, the new millennium with the dot.com crash, witnessed a flux of interest in performance management, value creation and strategy formulation. Related intellectual capital literature grew, accompanied by technology mergers and acquisitions underscoring the need for valuing ―digital capital‖. This entire technological craze in adopting to change is necessitating the adoption of a futuristic vision on part of professionals and academicians. This paper attempts to offer a roadmap for interdisciplinary scholars by providing insight of what has been studied so far in e-business research, what topics face extinction due to technological advancement and what the future beholds for us in this realm. Its distinctiveness lies in its use of an integrated methodology combining broad literature review (spanning through the almost two decade-long lifetime of e-business literature between the years 1995-2013) and content analysis of 41 global e-business events organized by prominent academic and professional institutions in 2013. The trilingual (Turkish, English and German) keyword search process used in reaching current event information and the translation of such into English, may spearhead future studies of this kind. To the best of the knowledge at hand, this study is the first to provide a comprehensive literature review of past e-business research from a generalist perspective and utilize practitioners’ event as a tool for forecasting future research topics. Keywords: E-Business, E-Commerce, E-Business Research Topics, Emerging Topics in E-Business 1 INTRODUCTION AND AIM OF THE STUDY The aim of this study rests on the premise that e-business research, more so than any other topic in business literature, is facing the challenge of renewing itself at the flying speed of the internet. Digital agility, flexibility in adopting to change coupled with a futuristic vision are presenting themselves as vitally necessary skills, not only for professionals, but also, for academicians. The difficulties that academic studies face due to the dynamic and quickly exhaustive nature of e-business topics are not new the research world. Some obstacles to high-quality e-commerce research are still valid today like the rapid change characterizing the distortion of terminology and data. Drew (2002) expands these examples underscoring the lack of familiarity with e-commerce technologies by many management scholars and the lack of established instruments and research approaches. This paper attempts to offer a roadmap for interdisciplinary scholars by providing insight of what has been studied so far in e-business research, what topics face extinction due to technological advancement and what the future beholds for us in this realm. Its distinctiveness lies in its use of an integrative methodology combining broad literature review (spanning through the almost two decade- long lifetime of e-business literature) and content analysis. The trilingual keyword search process used in reaching current event information and the translation of such into English may spearhead future studies of this kind. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to provide a comprehensive literature review of past e-business research from a generalist perspective. 2 METHODOLOGY An in-depth literature review of 55 journals published between the years 1995 and 2013 has been undertaken from which 300 studies have been selected. The selection criteria of these studies have primarily been keyword searches such as ―e-commerce, e-business, and internet‖. Furthermore the agendas of most recent conferences surrounding the ―e‖ - theme have been analyzed.