The distribution of articles from 1999 to 2012 is shown in Fig. 2. From this data we can see that there was an increasing
trend in the number of IB adoption studies during this period. While IB systems were starting to emerge during the mid-
1990s, the issue of customer adoption of IB was not addressed in the literature until 1999. The increasing number of studies
is confirmed by the linear trend line in Fig. 2. From this trend, it would appear that the attention given to IB adoption has
increased over time, and remains an important area of research. Though reliable data on the global growth of IB adoption
is not readily available, if we use data on the growth of Internet users as a proxy, we can also see from Fig. 2 that the growth
in articles appears to be tracking in line with global growth in Internet use (r = 0.983, p < 0.001). This would suggest that the
topic of IB adoption is likely to remain an important area of scholarship in the years to come, particularly as the diffusion of
the Internet is still very much a first-World phenomenon.