Discerning citation patterns in dominant BME literature streams - lessons for other streams?

Abstract

As the business and management education (BME) literature mounts, some highly-cited streams have become more dominant than other lesser-cited streams. In this bibliometric study, we compare the development of two highly-cited BME streams–online management education and entrepreneurship education– against a more established BME literature stream, experiential learning. Although the latter has some very well-cited articles, it curiously remains relatively less cited than other streams. Our goal is to investigate similarities and differences among these three BME streams’ citation patterns to provide prescriptions on how other BME streams could avoid self-inflicted citation barriers. We found distinct differences in behavior patterns between the streams using citation-based input and outcome measures. The entrepreneurship education literature shows strong linkages to the research of entrepreneurship discipline, whereas the online/hybrid education literature showed evidence of either influencing or being influenced by educational research. Conversely, although it had some very highly cited articles, the experiential learning stream showed inconclusive patterns in both types of works that it cited or was cited by in other articles. We believe this suggests that there is opportunity for scholars in other streams to raise their scholarly profiles by increasing their dialogue and defining their terms more consistently.