Scientific Knowledge and Regional Development: a bibliometric analysis of entrepreneurial productions

Abstract

Although research into entrepreneurship focuses on aspects inherent to entrepreneur’s figure, universities of this nature and knowledge transfer, the main issue that still permeates it is the scarcity of scientific studies that explore the entrepreneurial nature of the productions in terms of quality, dissemination and measurement, linked to regional development. The aim of this article is to measure the entrepreneurial nature of knowledge through Lotka’s law, in the regional development context. Considering bibliometry as the research’s methodological tool, the investigation of the materials collected on the Web of Science and Scopus Elsevier bases was subdivided into performance analysis, scientific mapping, Lotka distribution and qualitative analysis of the most relevant productions. It was concluded that Lotka's distributional index, if in isolation way, has weaknesses in dealing with the entrepreneurship level applied to regional development, especially with regard to the concept abstraction applied to this nature in productions and its complexity in the perception and treatment of the variables that make it up.