Forest entrepreneurship: A bibliometric analysis and a discussion about the co-authorship networks of an emerging scientific field

Abstract

Forest management has been recognized as a significant challenge for various scientific fields, namely because the difficulties in creating employment and economic dynamics in the forestry sector. Actually, it is not easy to generate more returns, in this sector, for the land owners, in addition to the production of wood after several years, depending on the produced species. In general, these difficulties lead to the land abandonment and a large set of associated problems like the forest fires. The main objective of this research is therefore to highlight the main insights from the literature related with the forest entrepreneurship, as supports for the several stakeholders, namely the policymakers, stressing the main gaps in the current scientific literature. In this paper, we have developed a bibliometric analysis through the VOSviewer software, complemented with a literature review, considering 83 articles obtained from the Web of Science (core collection) and Scopus related with the topic of ‘forest’ and ‘entrepreneurship’. We detailed the networks of Journals, Countries, Terms and Authors that have been researching and publishing in the scientific domains of ‘forest entrepreneurship’. Additionally, we studied measures of social networks analysis for each case. This kind of analysis for these topics has a particular novelty, because there is still a significant scarcity of studies addressing these approaches. In fact, searching, for example, in WOS (all databases) for the topics ‘forest’, ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘bibliometric’ we found zero documents (the same for Scopus platform, considering the article title, abstract and keywords). We concluded that the recent field of ‘forest entrepreneurship’ has allowed a higher level of co-authorships and a lower level of centrality in the citations’ network. We identified, also, that there are some gaps in the scientific literature, namely related with the few multidisciplinary networks outside the forest sciences in these topics. Finally, we observed that these topics are related with authors who, on average, published with 9 co-authors along their career and that authors working on the most generic topic of ‘forest’ tend to have 17 different co-authors, reinforcing the characteristics of ‘forestry entrepreneurship’ as a relevant but emerging scientific field.