Editorial: Issue 3 (volume 12)

Citation

Son Dinh, V. and Nguyen, N. (2024), "Editorial: Issue 3 (volume 12)", Journal of Trade Science, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 153-154. https://doi.org/10.1108/JTS-09-2024-038

We are excited to introduce Issue 3 (Volume 12) of the Journal of Trade Science. This third issue of 2024 consists of four articles, including a general review, a bibliometric analysis and two empirical papers that address contemporary business and research issues.

The first article, contributed by Lim, entails a general review informed by the 3Es of expertise, experience and exposure, presenting a comprehensive typology of validity that can be employed in different research stages. This article emphasizes the importance of establishing content, face, convergent, discriminant, nomological and predictive validity in research, especially for business disciplines. It also presents a comprehensive framework to guide researchers in establishing validity across the research process. This article makes important contributions by deepening the understanding of the multifaceted nature of validity and offering a practical guide for researchers on how and when to establish different types of validity.

In the second article, Pham, Wong and Bui perform a bibliometric analysis of 2,244 journal articles to uncover the evolution and trends in psychological capital (PsyCap) research. Using VOSviewer software, Microsoft Excel and an online text analysis tool to analyze the data, their results demonstrate a rapid rise in PsyCap research during the 2019–2023 period and various antecedents and outcomes of PsyCap. Notably, keyword co-occurrence analysis reveals six clusters: (1) PsyCap’s role in the organizational environment, (2) PsyCap and adolescents’ wellbeing, (3) PsyCap and innovative behavior, (4) PsyCap among university students, (5) PsyCap in human life and (6) PsyCap dimensions. This article’s up-to-date and comprehensive insights assist scholars in advancing the PsyCap research field.

The third article, written by Bui and Irmayanti, explores which kind of information on corporate websites affects employment brand equity and how employment brand equity impacts corporate reputation and job growth. Data were obtained from different sources, including the websites of 40 companies in the US Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work in 2012. Results indicate a high level of commonality among these 40 corporate websites and that the number of forms of online support (e.g. online question and answer and social media) is associated with the companies’ ranking. Another interesting finding is that employment brand equity does not significantly affect a company’s reputation or job growth. This article adds to the employment branding literature and provides practical implications for employing web presence to enhance employment brand equity.

In the final article, Zaheer, Anwar, Iantovics, Manzoor, Raza and Khan develop and validate a unique model that explains how key attributes of electronic commerce (e-commerce) affect e-trust and purchase intentions through online food delivery applications (OFDAs). Utilizing data obtained from 493 food consumers, the results of structural equation modeling reveal that e-trust mediates the impact of e-security, e-privacy, e-payment, e-innovativeness and usability on purchase intentions. Moreover, fear of contagious diseases (e.g. COVID-19) weakens the relationship between e-trust and purchase intentions. These findings offer important implications for researchers and practitioners (e.g., web developers, application designers and restaurants).

We hope that you find interesting new material in this issue. On behalf of the editorial team, we thank the authors for giving us the opportunity to evaluate and publish their original work. We are also grateful to the reviewers who voluntarily contributed their time and expertise to the review process.