Mapping the social entrepreneurship research: Bibliographic coupling, co-citation and co-word analyses

Abstract

In recent years, social entrepreneurship has received an increasing attention from the academic community. Social entrepreneurship is a topic related to various areas such as economics, management, education, sociology, psychology, and it is not surprising that issues related to social entrepreneurship are always debated with various definitions, methods, and approaches. This study aims to establish networks and maps in social entrepreneurship based on a systematic review of 1361 publications from the Web of Science database. More specifically, three methods of bibliographic analysis, namely bibliographic coupling, co-citation and co-word analyses are used to explore publication rankings and the main clusters by each method, the most influential publications, authors, journals, and keywords are therefore identified. The results from this study help researchers locate their research, discover potential themes for future research, and make social entrepreneurship knowledge more accessible to new researchers and policymakers.

Keywords

• social entrepreneurship
• bibliographic coupling
• co-citation
• co-word