Internet Search as Technical Data Collection: A Balance of Literature and the Main Challenges for its Use

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the theoretical research on the topic of data via the Internet to identify the main authors that debate on this form of data collection and point out the most discussed topics by these authors in academia. To this end, it made a bibliometric research in the Web of Science database and we tried to identify the total number of publications, thematic areas, year of publication, authors, types of documents, title of sources, funding agencies, institutions, languages and countries of these publications. The qualitative analysis of the data showed that the internet collection technique has been widely used for various thematic areas, increasing in recent years, countries in North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and even Brazil. The research showed that the main authors of the thematic areas that discuss the topic with a focus on collection technique itself, debate about the potential respondent approach (not to compromise the response rate), the structure and design of the collection instrument, the issue of representativeness of the selected sample and the concern about the quality of data collected.