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Origin and emergence of entrepreneurship as a research field

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Abstract

This paper seeks to map out the emergence and evolution of entrepreneurship as an independent field in the social science literature from the early 1990s to 2009. Our analysis indicates that entrepreneurship has grown steadily during the 1990s but has truly emerged as a legitimate academic discipline in the latter part of the 2000s. The field has been dominated by researchers from Anglo-Saxon countries over the past 20 years, with particularly strong representations from the US, UK, and Canada. The results from our structural analysis, which is based on a core document approach, point to five large knowledge clusters and further 16 sub-clusters. We characterize the clusters from their cognitive structure and assess the strength of the relationships between these clusters. In addition, a list of most cited articles is presented and discussed.

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Notes

  1. See also the more recent work by Teixeira (2011) as well as the exhaustive overview by Landström and Persson (2010).

  2. We follow the studies cited earlier in their focus on the Web of Knowledge databases. The biases of the used databases are well known (see e.g., Glänzel 2012) and interpret our results within this specific context.

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Acknowledgments

The methodology has partially been developed in the context of the ERACEP project within the Coordination and Support Actions (CSAs) of the ERC work programme. The authors wish to acknowledge this support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kent Business School, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT1 7PE, UK

    M. Meyer

  2. SC-Research Institute, University of Vaasa, Vaasa, Finland

    M. Meyer

  3. Regnier Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Henry W. Bloch School of Management, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, MO, 64110, USA

    D. Libaers

  4. ECOOM and Department of MSI, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Waisstraat 6, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    M. Meyer, B. Thijs, W. Glänzel & K. Debackere

  5. Department of Science Policy & Scientometrics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    W. Glänzel

  6. Department of Informatics, London Southbank University, London, UK

    K. Grant

Authors
  1. M. Meyer
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  2. D. Libaers
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  3. B. Thijs
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  4. K. Grant
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  5. W. Glänzel
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  6. K. Debackere
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Correspondence to M. Meyer.

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Meyer, M., Libaers, D., Thijs, B. et al. Origin and emergence of entrepreneurship as a research field. Scientometrics 98, 473–485 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1021-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1021-9

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