This study identified 19,831 publications to explore global trends of electronic commerce research during 1996-2012, based on all the subject categories of the SCIE and SSCI. A few significant global trends of EC research were revealed. First, proceedings papers and journal articles were the primary document types, contributing 12,200 and 6,707 publications respectively. Journal articles showed stable upward trends from 1996 to 2012. Second, the top three conferences contributed a 10.6% share of total proceedings papers and the top 20 journals published a 31.1% share of total journal articles. Third, “Computer Science Information Systems”, “Business” and “Computer Science Theory Methods” were the top three most popular subject categories.