Identifying influential studies and maturity level in intellectual structure of fields: evidence from strategic management

Abstract

We introduce new approaches to identify influential studies and maturity levels in the intellectual structure of disciplines. To this end, we investigate the evolution of the intellectual structure of strategic management (SM) by employing citation/co-citation analysis through network analysis for academic citations in articles published in the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ). We employed citation and co-citation analysis through social network analysis to identify influential studies. We developed an index and used the co-citations from studies in articles published in the SMJ to assess the maturity level. We identify influential papers by conducting citation analysis and using each cited article’s centrality scores to identify cited papers that hold critical positions in the network as our new approach. For the maturity level, we introduce an index and detect average distance, K-core, density, small-worldness, and cluster coefficient of the co-citation network. We conclude by recommending future directions to increase maturity in the SM research domain. This paper is the first to discuss methods to identify influential studies and the maturity level in the intellectual structure of fields in a comprehensive manner.