The evolution of university entrepreneurship over the past 20 years: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Today, university entrepreneurship has become an important issue in developed and developing countries, and much research has been done in this area that investigating the process of these researches contributes to the understanding and recognizing past trends as well as predicting and developing future of this field. The present study aimed to investigate the articles published in the field of university entrepreneurship between 2000 and 2019 with a bibliometric approach. The research population included all scientific articles (Article and Review) in the area of university entrepreneurship indexed on Scopus. Results included the identification of mostly cited articles, authors, institutions, leading countries, and mostly used keywords in the field. After gathering information from Scopus, graphical maps of co-citation, bibliographic coupling and co-occurrence have been drawn using VOSViewer software. The results showed that the process of published researches in the area of university entrepreneurship has been ascending in recent years such that the largest number of papers was related to 2019. Among countries, the USA was the most productive country, although most of the productive countries were located in Europe. University of Ghent (Belgium) was the most productive institute and Journal of Technology Transfer had the highest number of published articles; and keywords of “academic entrepreneurship”, “entrepreneurial university”, “technology transfer”, “entrepreneurship”, “university spin-offs” and “innovation” were the most commonly used keywords in university entrepreneurship articles. Finally, thematic clustering of most commonly used keywords has been performed.