Bibliometric Study of the Conceptual Approach of Intellectual Capital

Abstract

This study aims to map the conceptual approach of intangibles for the period 1982 – 2022 by using a bibliometric study. For this study, we used the Web of Science Core Collection database as a main reference for data collection. From 1982 to 2022, we filtered 21,564 records for our final sample. Collected data were analysed with descriptive statistics and co-word analysis, where a co-occurrence network was used for visualisation of co-word analysis. From a total of 37 460 keywords, the most frequent are: “Risk”, “Performance”, “Human Capital”, “Impact”, “Growth”, “Return” and “Volatility”. USA is the leader in researching the area of intellectual capital (approximately 30% of the total amount of papers belongs to USA researchers). Separately, we analysed the case of the Slovak Republic. Our results show that Slovakia has a huge time gap with other countries, but the positive is that Slovak researchers are in step with worldwide popular areas of intellectual capital. Also, we found that Slovak Republic published 0,75% of the total 21,564 papers. This study offers a wide range of the current state of researching intellectual capital worldwide and separately for the Slovak Republic.