Mapping the literature of social network ties in business and management field: A bibliometric study

Abstract

In recent years, academics have focused increasingly on social network connections across different organisations. Social networking for businesses is a topic that crosses many disciplines, including social sciences, computer science, engineering, management, education, sociology, and psychology, so it's no surprise that definitions, methods, and approaches to social networks are constantly debated. Based on a data set of 3466 publications from the Scopus database, the goal of this study is to map the previous literature on social network ties of organisations to the business and management area. The data set was taken from the Scopus database to investigate the main authors, the number of publications, the most influential journals, the most used keywords and the top productive institutions and countries. The goal of this study is to map the previous literature on the social network ties of organisations to the business and management area. The most influential publications, authors, journals, and keywords are thus identified using four methods of bibliographic analysis, as follows: bibliographic coupling, analysis of co-occurrence of authors' keywords, and analysis of co-authorship (a) countries and (b) authors. According to the study’s findings, the USA is the most prolific country, having over 900 publications in the past five years, followed by China and the UK. The publication trend has increased over the last 5 years in the business and management field and will keep increasing because of the growing interest of researchers and practitioners in the given field. Knowledge-based systems are found to be the top productive journal and Hong Kong Polytechnic University is the most influential institution with the highest number of publications.