Research Topics in Career Success throughout Time: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Since the 1960s, career success has been extensively studied from different angles. This paper aims to identify the main topics of interest covered by the literature throughout time frames defined based on the number of article citations. A Scopus database search was performed in November 2021, gathering 926 articles on career success that were analyzed in VOSviewer. The results show that several concepts were constant over the years, such as mentoring, mobility, income, education, gender, and culture, while other topics of interest were introduced more recently (e.g., career satisfaction, change, personality, networking, the link between the private and professional life, the relationship between objective and subjective career success). An understanding of historical career success research topics contributes to the development of future human resources strategies and policies.

Keywords

• career success
• subjective
• objective
• human capital
• career development
• career path
• leadership