Mapping international business and international business policy research: Intellectual structure and research trends

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibusrev.2020.101691Get rights and content

Highlights

  • There are eight shared research synergies between Asia, US and UK/Europe regions.

  • Competitive advantage, firms and firm performance are the strongest themes.

  • IB studies are primarily about performance, emerging MNE and MNCs/MNEs more broadly.

  • IB policy studies center on foreign business attraction, transnational governance and IB promotion.

  • Sole authorships are largely replaced by co-authorships, often on national level.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the core international business (IB) areas covered by ten IB-focused journals to date using 13,937 documents reflecting more than 300 years of combined publication history. Using bibliometric and citation analysis, it provides a systematic understanding of the current IB landscape, explicates the relevance of the future of IB research and depicts trends in this research field with emerging prevalent themes identified. The strongest themes across IB journals are performance, perspective and emerging economies/MNEs, shared strongly across UK/Europe, US and Asia-based journals. Our findings report on the prevalent research field, economy and geography, the latter analyzing the impact of author numbers and distribution, and thus, scale effects. Within this context, sole authorships are largely replaced by co-authorships, yet often on national level. We further limited the study to IB policy and found the focus centers on key themes of foreign business attraction, transnational governance and IB promotion.

Introduction

International business (IB) literature has grown significantly in the last few decades, particularly with information flowing within and across journals. There are notably exceptional sources of IB knowledge, as found in key journals in the field, and scholars and practitioners alike depend on their scholarship and practical application of this knowledge in international business settings. However, despite this growth, our understanding of the IB landscape is limited to a few studies that feature in a select number of journals within a narrow time range or those that focus on a single IB topic. What if we can take the ‘best’ sources of IB knowledge and create a comprehensive picture of this IB landscape to better contribute to our understanding? This is where our contribution lies. We suggest a research analysis to provide a level playing field, and by extension, our contribution to the emergence of the increasingly prominent field of ‘international business policy’ (IBP).

First, using the methodology applied by Verbeke and Calma (2017) for Footnotes in JIBS 1970-2016, which specifically examined the contribution of a single journal (Journal of International Business Studies), our paper seeks to map the research geography of the entire IB discipline based on ten key journals. In terms of timeframes, the data analysis was conducted from January 2018 to June 2018, including all available data from all the journals under consideration up to June 2018, and using a search filter year of 1900 to date of search to include all possible publications from these journals. This was to provide and support our claim of a comprehensive analysis of the IB discipline. This paper provides a thorough analysis of what constitutes the core IB ‘policy’ areas already covered by IB-focused journals using citation analysis. In doing so, it allows us to identify the journals’ key strategic knowledge contribution objectives, their potential key value-add and value proposition, and to better understand their required focus and strategy. To our knowledge, our paper is the first study of the ‘IB landscape’ of this kind, at this level of analysis and scope. More than fourteen years prior to this investigation, Acedo and Casillas (2005) conducted an important investigation of the international management (IM) field using co-citation analysis. Their work was limited to five journals and included four years of data (1997–2000) focusing exclusively on references and co-citations. We go beyond this in terms of scope and analysis. We also note the work by Kirca and Yaprak (2010) who found IB researchers’ reluctance to use meta-analytic techniques for synthesizing IB research. They note only a few analyses of this nature were found for international business compared to marketing or management. Fetscherin, Voss, and Gugler (2010) used bibliometric analysis to investigate how foreign direct investment (FDI) to China has evolved; a study limited to a particularly focal topic (FDI) using 422 articles. Similarly, the review conducted by López-Duarte, Vidal‐Suárez, and González‐Díaz (2016) analyzed leading IB and management journals from 2000 to 2012 using 265 articles. Our work aims to be even more comprehensive, and while not employing meta-analysis as suggested by Kirca and Yaprak, our own analysis adds breadth and depth to the understanding of the IB field. Given the growth of relevance of the research field, our study involves a larger scope with 10 focused journals, all their available publications and using all available metadata.

Second, we aim to visualize this comprehensive and detailed research field to allow for meaningful analysis of IB and IBP knowledge flows. This allows potential contributors to any IB journal, and to potential neighboring disciplines, to better understand the focus of manuscripts sought and accepted and readership perception.

Our objective is threefold, as shown by this paper’s structure. First, an analysis of the research geography of IB publications examines location of authors’ affiliation (first affiliation only), in terms of country and geographic region. We use as reference the Academy of International Business (AIB) Chapter List (2018a), distinguishing Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (MEA), the Americas (plus a separation in North America of USA and Canada), and Latin America (LATAM). This allows us to explore whether there are specific patterns in the various regions or countries in terms of interest. Second, we scrutinize the data to detect peak or weak trends in specific IBP research field categories. This provides indications that may help predictions of future trends in submission rates and competition for authorship. Third, we investigate whether papers tend to be sole or collaboratively authored, and if multi-authorships take place mainly, we investigate if they occur nationally, cross-border (within the same region) or internationally (cross-regional) which would imply policy areas that reach interregional or global scale. These differentiations will reveal scope patterns.

We then proceed to discussing the findings, providing a comprehensive view on revealed categories and trends. The paper concludes with suggestions as to the applicability of IBP core fields and their dynamics, and future agenda.

Our contribution strives to provide timely comprehensive insights into the IB research field which allows for a sound understanding of the role that IB journals play. At the same time, it serves to provide recommendations for potential contributors, thereby also providing important guidance for IB authors and reviewers. This article, hence, serves to identify, depict and unlock the foundation for IB and IBP contributions.

Section snippets

Literature review

Other than the limited number of bibliometric studies performed on international business or international management publications mentioned earlier, it is important to recognize some of the attempts in the past to present the evolution of the international business as a field. Some of these attempts are driven by macro-environmental trends, such as technological changes, trade challenges and globalization forces, juxtaposed with concerns about the relevance of IB research. In the early years

Methods

The data used in this analysis originates from the bibliometric information of Scopus and Web of Science on ten journals. The ten journals selected are African Affairs, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, International Business Review (formerly Scandinavian International Business Review), Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of International Management, Journal of World Business (including Columbia JWB), Management and Organization Review,

Results

In the following section, we highlight the research geography of the IB field using author and index keywords by examining the abstracts of articles published in the ten IB journals. We assumed that it would be interesting and particularly relevant to IB-focused journals and scholars to look into the past 10 years so that trends and patterns can be revealed. The nature of authorship and collaborations that exists concludes this section.

Discussion

The development of a particular focus on IBP, as reflected in the aims of new journals such as JIBP, or promoted by IBR, takes a particularly important place in IB literature development. As Buckley, Doh, and Benischke (2017) maintain, “allied social sciences – such as economics, political science, and sociology – rarely cite IB research, while the reverse is somewhat more common” (p. 1046). They state that this may be due to inward-looking and self-referential tendencies as topics mature, and

Conclusion

The findings of our investigation provide essential and specific guidance to authors and reviewers, and serve as an introduction to non-IB scholars as to the focus of the past and current research field and geography in IB, and more specifically IBP. Building on this basis, IB-focused journals can reshape their agenda and further make significant contributions to crucial policy developments underpinning the current and future road to the internationalization of the firm. In addition, we trust

Declaration of Competing Interest

None.

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