A bibliometric review of research on communication in virtual project teams

Abstract

Motivation – the topic of communication in project teams, especially those virtual ones, has been studied by many researchers and it would be valuable to know which research areas have been already explored and which need more attention. It would be also worth analyzing which countries and authors have been mainly contributing to the topic, and what publication types are mostly used to convey research in that area. Even though there are numerous literature reviews regarding project communication issues and different aspects of virtual teams, there is no one dedicated specifically to the topic of communication in virtual project teams.Aim – the paper aims to identify the scientific output in the area of communication in virtual project teams from the last 20 years (2001-2020) and analyze it for its volume, geographic distribution, publication types, areas and types of research and contributing authors.Method – a bibliometric approach has been applied to answer the research questions regarding the number of publications in the studied period, most contributing countries and most prolific authors, prevailing publication types and research topics addressed in the studied literature. Three databases – Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar were used to search for publications about communication in virtual project teams and the refined results from these databases were combined into the final dataset which was then analyzed to provide answers to the research questions.Contribution – the results of the bibliometric review of research on communication in virtual teams show that the most frequently undertaken topics concern methods and tools for communication in virtual teams, while issues linking communication with trust or leadership are the least explored areas.