Foreign Study on Entrepreneurship Education Based on Scientometrics

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education has attracted widespread attention and has become a rapidly growing research field in recent years. However, there are certain deficiencies of the existing research on entrepreneurship education at present. Firstly, since the concept of entrepreneurship education was presented, the research topic has been relatively scattered, and the lack of systematic framework has hindered the development of theoretical and empirical research in this field. Secondly, academic research is relatively lagging behind, compared with the practice of entrepreneurship education. The development of entrepreneurship education action and intervention has far exceeded the development of theory. We use entrepreneurship education” as topic words to search the articles in nearly 20 years from 1997 to 2016 in the Web of Science Core Collection database. Only 389 articles are found, far from the scale of mature field. The publications about entrepreneurship education in CNKI database in China have been above certain level, but most of them pay more attention to the introduction of foreign entrepreneurship education modes and superficial case analysis, without deep, high-level and multi-faceted discussion. The present situations are unable to meet realistic demand for entrepreneurship education under the background of mass entrepreneurship and innovation” in China. Lastly, although some reviews have concluded the characteristics, status, goal and present situation of this research field, most of them are presented in the form of subjective descriptions. The results tend to be influenced by not only literature search scope and quantity, but also the knowledge of scholars. Because entrepreneurship education is an interdisciplinary research field, the comprehensiveness of a literature review makes very high requirements of knowledge background and research depth of scholars. It is necessary and urgent to construct an objective and comprehensive framework to promote the further study of entrepreneurship education. We adopts the method of scientometrics to analyze the literature of entrepreneurship education, collected in the Web of Science Core Collection database from 1997 to 2016 to build an integrated framework for entrepreneurship education research in this paper. First of all, through the interpretation of co-citation map, we find that multidisciplinary theories such as entrepreneurship concept with a focus on opportunities, planned behavior theory, entrepreneurial event theory, self-efficacy theory as well as resource based theory are widely transformed in this field. Secondly, through the keyword co-occurrence of the knowledge map, we analyze entrepreneurship education research topics and its evolution in each stage. The results show that the main research themes include present situation and challenges, curriculum and teaching methods, effectiveness evaluation especially that on intention, and framework. These deep and interdisciplinary research themes form an integrated theme framework of entrepreneurship education. Finally, some suggestions are put forward to promote future research, such as promoting in-depth research, expanding the measurement of effectiveness, discovering the mechanism on entrepreneurial intention and the localization study in China. This paper contributes to the theoretical research in the following aspects. On the one hand, the topic of current study of entrepreneurship education is fragmented, while there is great demand for the quality and quantity of theoretical research. We use scientometrics to sort out the literature in recent twenty years in the field of entrepreneurship education abroad, integrating classical theories and frontier research topics. Our purpose in this paper is to provide objective and clear research framework for the subsequent theoretical research. It promotes the deep analysis and diversified research. It is also convenient for domestic scholars to understand the international research forefront in this field, expectaing meaningful research in the context of China in the future. On the other hand, entrepreneurship education is gradually popularized in higher education in China at present. This paper aims to promote mutual promotion between theory and practice, providing theoretical guidance for the practice of entrepreneurship education in China.