Examining the Evolvement of Entrepreneurship Papers in Management Literature Using Bibliometric Analysis and Scientific Mapping Methods

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the evolvement process of the concept of entrepreneurship worldwide from 1970 to up till now. The study analyzes and interprets how entrepreneurship studies change and evolve using bibliometric analysis and scientific mapping method. On the one hand, bibliometric analysis involves detailed information about scientific papers including the origin country, author(s), cooperation between authors, citations, references, institutions, and publication year. On the other hand, scientific mapping is a method that concentrates to determine the specific research areas of a scientific field and the evolvement process of the underlying areas. In other words, the purpose of scientific mapping is to depict the structural and dynamic appearance. This study shows how many scientific papers were published in Web of Science (WoS) database between the sample period of 1970-2015 and exhibits the distribution of the corresponding papers regarding the scope of journals and keywords. Thus, this paper aims to put forward the subject differentiation affecting entrepreneurship related papers in management literature. Results reveal that there was an increase on the number of publications after 2006. Regarding a country-based observation, the US and the UK ranked first and second with 2,637 and 1,081 scientific papers, respectively, whereas China takes the third place with 566 scientific papers. Particularly, Turkey takes 26th place with 78 scientific papers which refers to 0.97% share of all papers worlwide. A scientific mapping approach with respect to two different periods between 2001-2015 indicates the appearance of a thematic change. This thematic change has been emerged as the prominence and and draw back of some associated papers.