Abstract
This article, which began as an effort to gauge trends in and contributions to the broad field of “entrepreneur/entrepreneurship,” reviews 5,476 academic articles on entrepreneurship that were published in 522 Social Sciences Citation Index and Science Citation Index journals from 1996 to June 2012. This survey identifies keywords and conducts a review to search for and identify related articles in the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database. We then present our findings, including the number of publications by year, categorization of article types, main academic journals, authors, and most-cited articles. The citation counts for authors, journals, and articles are also analyzed. This study indicates that the number of articles related to the keyword entrepreneur increased from 1996 to the end of 2011, which is a sign of an upward trend in the influence of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur research fascinated numerous scholars during the study period covering 16.5 years. In particular, researchers from the USA, England, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands have made the most contributions to this field. This literature review provides evidence that the concept of entrepreneur attracted academic researchers, resulting in significant contributions to the field of entrepreneur research.
Highlights
Scientometrics (2014) 99:353–369Entrepreneurship has been known to serve an important function in job creation, economic growth, and development of various geographic entities, from villages to regions and even to entire countries
This article, which began as an effort to gauge trends in and contributions to the broad field of ‘‘entrepreneur/entrepreneurship,’’ reviews 5,476 academic articles on entrepreneurship that were published in 522 Social Sciences Citation Index and Science Citation Index journals from 1996 to June 2012
This study indicates that the number of articles related to the keyword entrepreneur increased from 1996 to the end of 2011, which is a sign of an upward trend in the influence of entrepreneurs
Summary
Entrepreneurship has been known to serve an important function in job creation, economic growth, and development of various geographic entities, from villages to regions and even to entire countries. The authors argued that focusing on entrepreneurship research at the intersection of the constructs of individuals, opportunities, modes of organization, and the environment can define the field and enhance its legitimacy Their regression analysis results demonstrate a positive trend for entrepreneurship publication in management journals, the percentage of entrepreneurship articles in their findings remains low. Other studies referenced or discussed entrepreneurship research in terms of its development and provided background on the central issue of legitimacy In his survey of tenured entrepreneurship scholars in leading universities, MacMillan (1991, 1993) found that publications indicative of the highest scholarly competence include the Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, and Strategic Management Journal. The authors of the present study first describe their data-gathering methods and present their findings
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