As electronic marketplaces grow and a large number of consumers exchange their opinions on products and services on the Internet, many studies have been conducted in the area of online consumer reviews. This paper analyzes the research trend of the online consumer reviews by investigating those studies in an attempt to provide future research directions. Many researchers have focused on the effects of online reviews on consumer behaviors as well as the usefulness of the online reviews. In particular, review contents, characteristics of reviewers/consumers and features of products/services have been identified as influencing factors on the effects of the online consumer reviews. For the review contents, the number and the volume of the contents have increasing effects on the online reviews, while the direction (positive vs. negative) of the contents has resulted in conflicting effects of the review. The reputation and trustfulness of reviewers, consumers’prior knowledge on the products, consumers’product involvement, and types of the products were investigated as these factors influence the effectiveness of the online consumer reviews. Social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) nowadays play an important role to disseminate online reviews among consumers. Thus, it is necessary to study how social media influence the effects of online reviews on consumers. Since some firms abuse the online reviews for their own sakes, we recognize the necessity for empirical studies on the side effects of the online reviews.