Page 223 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

222 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

A review on studies of cloud computing adoption behavior

Xiaobin LU & Jianya WANG 1 ∗

Cloud computing technology has great commercial value. The user perspective of cloud computing
adoption research has attracted wide attention of scholars. This paper is a systematic review on the
research status of cloud computing adoption behavior based on literature collected from foreign
databases.
We conducted a systematic search in nine foreign language databases, which are Elsevier
ScienceDirect, IEEE/IET Electronic Library(IEL), Emerald, Taylor & Francis, Springer, ProQuest
Digital Dissertations & Theses(PQDT), EBSCO—Academic Search Premier, ACM Digital Library,
and Google Scholar. Title search terms are“cloud computing”, “cloud service”, “cloud storage”,
“SaaS”, “IaaS”, “PaaS” grouping with “adopt*”, “accept*”. The literature publication time is
not limited. The retrieval deadline is October 15, 2014. The related literature selection conditions
are: 1) non-academic research literature were excluded; 2) non-user adoption behavior, or adoption
factors related literature were excluded; 3) references in the literature were used for retrospective
search. The final number of related literature totals 95.
With a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we conducted an analysis with
the distribution of the number of literature, the subject, the object, factors of concern, theory and
model, research findings and other aspects. Through literature review, we get the following results:
developing countries and SMEs should pay attention to the research of cloud computing adoption
to promote their adoption of cloud computing technology; the individual cloud computing adoption
behavior will become an important research topic; an empirical model of cloud computing should
be built; the factors influencing cloud computing adoption behavior should be chosen and analyzed
under the application scenario, and then, the security and privacy, trust of vendors should be
regarded as important factors in this area.
Implications: it is an important reference to the cloud computing adoption researchers with the
analysis on the adoption subject, object, theory, factors of concern. In addition, we find that it
is also important for the stakeholders in the cloud computing market to adopt cloud computing
technologies or services, including cloud service providers, governments, regulators and users.
The limitation is that this study only conducted a review of the literature from foreign language
databases, and a small number of literature in the Chinese databases are not in the scope of this paper.
This study attempts to explore and analyze the research status about the behavior of cloud
computing adoption. We get the research characteristics of cloud computing adoption behavior
from subject, object, theory, factors of concern, and compared them with the previous research
in information systems adoption behavior. Through the analysis of the findings, we identified the
primarily concerned study subjects and the future research trends.

* Correspondence should be addressed to Jianya Wang, Email: wjyhbu@163.com