Thirty years of research on high-growth entrepreneurship: bibliometric overview of its H-Classics

Abstract

In recent years, high-growth entrepreneurship (HGE) research has gained increasing importance. For this reason, it is considered necessary to analyze papers that have had the most significant impact on the development of the discipline and that should be familiar to all researchers. Building new knowledge on these works is important because it provides legitimacy and coherence to the future development of this research field. Thus, this paper aims to identify and characterize the classic articles in the field of HGE, a line of research that has seen significant growth in the last 30 years. The H-Classics method is used to identify these papers. Subsequently, several bibliometric aspects of this collection are analyzed, such as the forums of journals where they have been published, the most productive authors, the patterns of collaboration, and an analysis of the conceptual structure through co-word analysis. Exhaustive content analysis is carried out to complement this vision, identifying the proposed objectives, methodologies, types of data, analysis techniques used, and their main contributions in three consecutive periods. The results are of value to researchers interested in high-growth firms because they allow us to understand the foundations on which this discipline has been built through its classics and to determine its main challenges for the future.