Online Information Review Research and Its Future Direction: A Literature Review

Online reviews offer businesses feedbacks on their products and services toward proper planning and customer satisfaction. Previous studies have helped in improving innovation and giving business solutions on this important aspect of business management, but also identified some challenges. The purpose of this review is to identify research gaps in the extant literature and recommend them for future studies, relevant to online information. This paper conducts a comprehensive literature review of 64 peer-reviewed publications (2008 till date) sampled from selected SCI/SSCI papers on online reviews. The study analyzes the major research problems identified in the literature, identifies the methodologies and theoretical frameworks applied and conducts qualitative content analyses of the findings. The findings reveal the need for more multilingual online review and recommender systems, addition of more consumer review reward-mechanisms and motivations, enhancing interest of netizens in eWOM communications and the need for new features to disallow review modification after submission. It further presents recommendations for future research, relevant to online information review to increase reliability, improve ranking, user reference and usefulness of reviews.