UAH College of Business professor recognized as "Highly Cited Researcher"

March 17, 2025 - HUNTSVILLE, AL. – Dr. Xiaotong Li, a professor in the College of Business at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), has been named to a list of the world's most cited researchers by Clarivate Analytics, a global provider of analytics in academia and government. The Highly Cited Researchers list identifies researchers who have published multiple papers that are frequently cited, placing them in the top one percent for citations in their fields over the past decade.

"Our Highly Cited Researchers program identifies and celebrates individuals who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their field(s) of research," Clarivate notes in the official award announcement. "This list, based on citation activity, is then refined using qualitative analysis and expert judgment as we observe for evidence of community-wide recognition from an international and wide-ranging network of citing authors. Of the world's population of scientists and social scientists, Highly Cited Researchers are 1 in 1,000."

Li's expertise at UAH, a part of The University of Alabama System, includes business analytics and big data; database management and electronic commerce in the Department of Information Systems, Supply Chain & Analytics. The researcher won the best paper of the year award for an article in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management from the IEEE Engineering Management Society, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Management Information Systems and Marketing Science, among numerous others.

"The research areas of mine that get the highest number of citations include emerging tools and technologies used in e-commerce, business applications of blockchain technology, sharing economy and mobile payment platforms," Li says, who has worked in UAH's business school for 24 years, where he played a key role in developing the master's program in business analytics.

Li's paper, How live streaming influences purchase intentions in social commerce: an IT affordance perspective, published in the journal Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, has been cited by scholars over 1,000 times alone since 2019.

"This paper is one of the earliest studies that examines how live streaming influences e-commerce customers' purchase intentions," the researcher explains.

Li has served on the editorial board of Marketing Science and is an associate editor of Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, noting his favorite areas for current and future research include "business applications of AI, enterprise digital transformation and internet platform competition."

Clarivate's analysis draws on data from its Web of Science citation index, together with qualitative analysis performed by experts at the Institute for Scientific Information.