Global Trend of Social Innovation Research

Abstract

The aim of this research is to identify the latest trends of the scientific publications in the social innovation literature. This research is conducted through bibliometric analysis of the available data from 1966 to 2019 in the Scopus database. The bibliometric analysis is carried out on all ‘published’ articles in the Scopus database. The search phrase used was “Social Innovation”. Out of 3140 articles, 1280 articles were included in the study based on their relevance to the objectives of this study. This research investigates parameters such as publications in line with the years, subject areas, top journals, top authors and countries contributing to the social innovation field, and also the collaborations of author and co-occurrence of keywords. Results indicate that Frances R. Westley (University of waterloo) is the most productive author in field. Additionally, we found that the most prolific journal is “sustainability” and the most productive country is the United Kingdom. A significant increase in the number of scientific publications in the social innovation field is observed since 2016 which leads to the conclusion that the topic has gained relevance among academicians in recent years. We used VoS Viewer visual bibliometric analyser to identify the co-occurrence of keywords and co-authorship of countries.