CIS Working Paper Series

OF TRANS-DISCIPLINARY CONCERN: A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL CLASSIFICATION OF THE PEER-TO-PEER FILESHARING RESEARCH LITERATURE

Since the advent of Napster and the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) filesharing applications which followed it, distributed storage and sharing of content has been a topic of increasing interest in many different disciplines. This paper presents a review of the literature on P2P filesharing systems.The research literature on such systems crosses the boundaries of several disciplines, so a multidimensional classification scheme encompassing all the relevant fields addressed in the existing literature is employed. A database design reflecting this classification system is discussed, and has been implemented. The potential uses of the multidimensional classification are explored. Patterns of research made visible by queries on the database are discussed. Findings of the various research fields are summarized.The contributions of this paper are (1) identification and implementation of frameworks for exploring research specifically on P2P filesharing systems, (2) the creation and implementation of a meta-framework approach for categorizing IS literature, and (3) a summary of the current state of research on P2P filesharing systems.

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