Article

Organizational Research Methods

2015, Vol. 18(3) 429-472
ª The Author(s) 2014
Bibliometric Methods in Reprints and permission:
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Management and Organization DOI: 10.1177/1094428114562629
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Ivan Zupic1 and Tomaž Čater1

Abstract
We aim to develop a meaningful single-source reference for management and organization scholars
interested in using bibliometric methods for mapping research specialties. Such methods introduce
a measure of objectivity into the evaluation of scientific literature and hold the potential to
increase rigor and mitigate researcher bias in reviews of scientific literature by aggregating the
opinions of multiple scholars working in the field. We introduce the bibliometric methods of cita-
tion analysis, co-citation analysis, bibliographical coupling, co-author analysis, and co-word analysis
and present a workflow for conducting bibliometric studies with guidelines for researchers. We
envision that bibliometric methods will complement meta-analysis and qualitative structured lit-
erature reviews as a method for reviewing and evaluating scientific literature. To demonstrate
bibliometric methods, we performed a citation and co-citation analysis to map the intellectual
structure of the Organizational Research Methods journal.

Keywords
bibliometrics, co-citation, bibliographic coupling, science mapping

Introduction
Synthesizing past research findings is one of the most important tasks for advancing a particular
line of research. Scholars have traditionally used two methods to make sense of earlier findings:
the qualitative approach of a structured literature review and the quantitative approach of meta-
analysis (Schmidt, 2008). We introduce a third method—science mapping—which is based on the
quantitative approach of bibliometric research methods and is being increasingly used to map the
structure and development of scientific fields and disciplines.
Science mapping uses bibliometric methods to examine how disciplines, fields, specialties, and
individual papers are related to one another. It produces a spatial representation of the findings
analogous to geographic maps (Calero-Medina & van Leeuwen, 2012; Small, 1999). Science map-
ping is a combination of classification and visualization (Boyack & Klavans, 2014). The aim is to
create a representation of the research area’s structure by partitioning elements (documents,

1
Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Corresponding Author:
Ivan Zupic, Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Kardeljeva pl. 17, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Email: [email protected]
430 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

authors, journals, words) into different groups. Visualization is then used to create a visual repre-
sentation of the classification that emerges.
Narrative literature reviews are subjected to bias by the researcher and often lack rigor (Tranfield,
Denyer, & Smart, 2003). Bibliometric methods employ a quantitative approach for the description,
evaluation, and monitoring of published research. These methods have the potential to introduce a
systematic, transparent, and reproducible review process and thus improve the quality of reviews.
Bibliometric methods are a useful aid in literature reviews even before reading begins by guiding
the researcher to the most influential works and mapping the research field without subjective bias.
Although bibliometric methods are not new (cf. Kessler, 1963; Small, 1973), they only started
to attract widespread attention with the proliferation of easily accessible online databases with
citation data (e.g., Thomson Reuters Web of Science [WOS], which contains the Social Science
Citation Index [SSCI] and SCI data) and the development of software for conducting bibliometric
analyses (e.g., BibExcel). Bibliometric methods have been used to map the fields of strategic man-
agement (e.g., Di Stefano, Verona, & Peteraf, 2010; Nerur, Rasheed, & Natarajan, 2008; Ramos-
Rodriguez & Ruiz-Navarro, 2004), entrepreneurship (e.g., Gartner, Davidsson, & Zahra, 2006;
Landström, Harirchi, & Åström, 2012; Schildt, Zahra, & Sillanpaa, 2006), innovation (e.g., Fager-
berg, Fosaas, & Sapprasert, 2012; Fagerberg & Verspagen, 2009), and others (see Appendix A
for a full list of studies published in management and organization). Some research fields (e.g.,
innovation, entrepreneurship, strategy) have more rapidly embraced bibliometric methods, while
others (e.g., organizational behavior, psychology) have been slower. We believe this is because
the knowledge base of the former is closer to bibliometric methods and that this represents a
big opportunity for researchers working in those fields that have yet to start publishing biblio-
metric studies.
Bibliometric methods allow researchers to base their findings on aggregated bibliographic data
produced by other scientists working in the field who express their opinions through citation, col-
laboration, and writing. When these data are aggregated and analyzed, insights into the field’s
structure, social networks, and topical interests can be put forward. The use of bibliometric anal-
ysis is growing rapidly. The median year of publication of bibliometric studies in management and
organization is 2011, meaning that over half the articles were published in the past three years. The
authors’ anecdotal experience also suggests that management scholars are becoming ever more
interested in using bibliometric methods to supplement the subjective evaluation of literature
reviews. Notwithstanding this growing interest, there are hardly any guidelines for conducting
structured literature reviews with bibliometric methods.
The purpose of this article is to develop a meaningful single-source reference for management
and organization scholars interested in bibliometric methods. The article’s main contribution is the
development of recommended workflow guidelines for carrying out bibliometric studies. We
synthesized the guidelines from 81 bibliometric studies in management and organization (details
about the selection and a full study list are available in Appendix A) and bibliometric methodology
literature. We demonstrated the use of these guidelines by performing a bibliometric analysis of
the Organizational Research Methods journal. Given that the use of bibliometric methods is on the
rise and there is a dearth of guidance on how to use these methods, this article may provide a valu-
able reference for scholars interested in bibliometric methods.

Bibliometric Methods
Almost five decades ago, Derek J. de Solla Price (1965) proposed scientific methods of science for
studying science (Boyack, Klavans, & Börner, 2005). Bibliometric methods (e.g., co-citation anal-
ysis, bibliographic coupling) use bibliographic data from publication databases to construct struc-
tural images of scientific fields. They introduce a measure of objectivity into the evaluation of
Zupic and Čater 431

scientific literature (Garfield, 1979) and can be used to detect informal research networks, namely,
‘‘invisible colleges,’’ that exist under the surface but are not formally linked (Crane, 1972; Price,
1965). These groups share research interests and have underlying contacts through personal com-
munication, conferences, and summer schools that are invisible to the outsider. Citation images of
research fields, aggregated through time, reflect authors’ judgments on the subject matter, meth-
odology, and the value of other writers’ work (White & McCain, 1998).
Bibliometric methods have two main uses: performance analysis and science mapping (Cobo,
López-Herrera, Herrera-Viedma, & Herrera, 2011a). Performance analysis seeks to evaluate the
research and publication performance of individuals and institutions. Science mapping aims to
reveal the structure and dynamics of scientific fields. This information about structure and devel-
opment is useful when the researcher’s aim is to review a particular line of research. Bibliometric
methods introduce quantitative rigor into the subjective evaluation of literature. They are able to
provide evidence of theoretically derived categories in a review article.
In the following section we will introduce the five main bibliometric methods. The first three
use citation data to construct measures of influence and similarity: citation analysis, co-citation
analysis, and bibliographical coupling. Co-author analysis uses co-authorship data to measure col-
laboration. Co-word analysis finds connections among concepts that co-occur in document titles,
keywords, or abstracts. A summary of bibliometric methods with their strengths and weaknesses is
provided in Table 1.
Most bibliometric studies provide a citation analysis of the research field, usually in the form of
top-N lists of the most cited studies, authors, or journals in the examined area. Citations are used as
a measure of influence. If an article is heavily cited, it is considered important. This proposition
rests on the assumption that authors cite documents they consider to be important for their work.
Citation analysis can provide information about the relative influence of the publications, but it lacks
the ability to identify networks of interconnections among scholars (Usdiken & Pasadeos, 1995).
Co-citation analysis (McCain, 1990) uses co-citation counts to construct measures of similarity
between documents, authors, or journals. Co-citation is defined as the frequency with which two
units are cited together (Small, 1973). A fundamental assumption of co-citation analysis is that the
more two items are cited together, the more likely it is that their content is related. Different types
of co-citation can be utilized, depending on the unit of analysis: document co-citation analysis,
author co-citation analysis (McCain, 1990; White & Griffith, 1981; White & McCain, 1998), and
journal co-citation analysis (McCain, 1991). Co-citation connects documents, authors, or journals
according to the way writers use them. This is a rigorous grouping principle repeatedly performed
by subject-matter experts who cite publications they deem valuable and/or interesting. Because
the publication process is time-consuming, the co-citation image reflects the state of the field some
time before, not necessarily how it looks now or how it may look tomorrow. It is a dynamic mea-
sure that changes through time. When examined over time, co-citations are also helpful in detect-
ing a shift in paradigms and schools of thought (Pasadeos, Phelps, & Kim, 1998).
Document co-citation analysis connects specific published documents (research articles, books,
editorials, or other published material). Author co-citation analysis (ACA) connects bodies of
writings by a person and therefore the authors who produced them (White & Griffith, 1981). ACA
can identify important authors and connect them through citation records (White & McCain,
1998). What is mapped is an author’s citation image. Journal co-citation analysis (JCA) aims to
connect related scientific journals.
A special form of co-citation is tri-citation analysis (Marion, 2002; McCain, 2009; McCain &
McCain, 2002), which examines the ‘‘intellectual fellow travelers’’ of a particular author or pub-
lication by analyzing works that have been co-cited with them. It has the potential for researching
the legacy of important authors or seminal studies. Tri-citation is a variant of co-citation analysis
where the focal author or publication is always one of the cited publications and provides the
432
Table 1. Summary of Bibliometric Methods.

Method Description Units of Analysis Pros Cons

Citation Estimates influence of Document Can quickly find the important Newer publications had less time to be
documents, authors, Author works in the field, cited, therefore citation count as a
or journals through Journal measure of influence is biased toward
citation rates. older publications,
Co-citation Connects documents, Document It is the most used and validated Co-citation is performed on cited arti-
authors, or journals Author bibliometric method. cles so it is not optimal for mapping
on the basis of joint Journal Connecting documents, research fronts. Citations take time
appearances in authors, or journals with to accumulate, so new publications
reference lists. co-citation has been shown cannot be connected directly but
to be reliable. only through knowledge base clus-
Since citation is a measure of ters.
influence, it offers a method to Several citations are needed to map
filter the most important articles, so it is impossible to map
works. articles that are not cited much.
When performing author co-citation
analysis on SSCI (WOS) data, only
first-author information is available.
Bibliographic Connects documents, Document Immediately available: does not It can only be used for limited timeframe
Coupling authors, or journals on Author require citations to (up to a five-year interval).
the basis of the number Journal accumulate. Can be used for It does not inherently identify the
of shared references. new publications that are not most important works by citation
cited yet, emerging fields, and counts as co-citation; it is difficult to
smaller subfields. know whether mapped publications
are important or not.
Co-author Connects authors when Author Can provide evidence of Collaboration is not always
they co-author the collaboration and produce the acknowledged with co-authorship.
paper. social structure of the field.
Co-word Connects keywords when Word It uses the actual content of Words can appear in different forms
they appear in the same documents for analysis (other and can have different meanings.
title, abstract, or methods only use bibliographic
keyword list. meta-data).
Zupic and Čater 433

Figure 1. Workflow for conducting science mapping with bibliometric methods.

context for co-citation analysis. For instance, the seminal paper on absorptive capacity (Cohen &
Levinthal, 1990) is one of the most influential papers in strategy and innovation. To examine the
context of its influence, one could produce a tri-citation analysis to connect all pairs of publica-
tions that are cited with Cohen and Levinthal (1990). This method could be especially appropriate
for special issues that celebrate anniversaries of important publications or are published in honor
of important authors.
Although bibliographic coupling (Kessler, 1963) is a decade older than co-citation (Small, 1973),
co-citation has been more frequently used for mapping science (Zhao & Strotmann, 2008).
434 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

Figure 2. Co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling (adapted from Vogel & Güttel, 2013).

Bibliographic coupling uses the number of references shared by two documents as a measure of
the similarity between them. The more the bibliographies of two articles overlap, the stronger their
connection. The difference between co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling is visually pre-
sented in Figure 2.
The number of references shared between two documents is static over time (i.e., for the rela-
tionship between two documents it does not matter when the analysis is conducted) as the number
of references within the article is unchanged, while relatedness based on co-citation develops with
citation patterns. As citation habits change, bibliographic coupling is best performed within a lim-
ited timeframe (Glänzel & Thijs, 2012). It is best to analyze publications from roughly the same
period of time (i.e., it makes no sense to couple a publication issued in 1964 with a publication
issued in 2012). A bibliographic coupling connection is established by the authors of the articles
in focus, whereas a co-citation connection is established by the authors who are citing the exam-
ined works.
When two documents are highly co-cited, this means that each individual document is also highly
individually cited (Jarneving, 2005). This indicates that documents selected through co-citation
thresholds are deemed more important by the researchers who are citing them. Yet the bibliographic
coupling measure cannot be used in such a way, so identifying which documents are more important
than others is a challenge when undertaking bibliographic coupling. However, this is also a weak-
ness of co-citation analysis: It carries more information for highly cited documents but is much less
reliable for clustering smaller niche specialties that are formed by less cited documents.
The choice of which method to employ depends on the goals of the analysis. To map a current
research front, bibliographical coupling might be used while to map older papers, co-citation
could be a better choice (Small, 1999). The latest studies show that the accuracy of bibliographic
coupling in representing a research front is better than that of a co-citation analysis (Boyack &
Klavans, 2010).
There are several limitations of citation-based bibliometric methods (citation analysis,
co-citation analysis, and bibliographical coupling). Based solely on the bibliometric data, it is
impossible to establish the reason that a particular publication was cited. Different citations of
the same publication can be made for many different reasons. The articles could be citing literature
to refute it (negative citations). It is quite possible for bad scientific work to receive more citations
than mere mediocre work (Wallin, 2005). However, citations for negative reasons are extremely
rare and scientists generally do not criticize previous literature too much (Garfield, 1979). And
even then, it is not necessarily valid to assume that critics are necessarily right, thus the critiqued
literature is likely to contain some merit. Citation-based metrics could be biased due to self-
citation in the form of author self-citation (citing publications where one is a co-author) or team
self-citation (citing publications authored by one’s collaborators). These practices tend to increase
citation frequencies and are thus a manipulation, although one would have to publish a tremendous
amount to reasonably increase the citation frequencies.
Zupic and Čater 435

Co-author analysis examines the social networks scientists create by collaborating on scientific
articles (Acedo, Barroso, Casanueva, & Galan, 2006). A relationship between two authors is
established when they co-publish a paper (Lu & Wolfram, 2012). Co-authoring scientific publica-
tions is presumed to be a measure of collaboration. Co-authorship reflects stronger social ties than
other relatedness measures, which makes it particularly suitable for examining social networks
rather than intellectual structures of research fields. Further, because bibliographic data contain
information about authors’ institutional affiliations and their geographical location, co-author
analysis can examine the issues of collaboration on the level of institutions and countries.
Co-authorship as a measure of collaboration assumes that authoring a publication is synonymous
with being responsible for the work done. However, just because a person’s name appears as a
co-author of a scientific article, it is not necessarily because they contributed a significant amount
of work but could be purely ‘‘honorary authorship’’ for social or other reasons (Katz & Martin,
1997). On the other hand, there might be scientists who contributed to the work but whose names
do not appear on the author sheet.
Co-word analysis (Callon, Courtial, Turner, & Bauin, 1983) is a content analysis technique that
uses the words in documents to establish relationships and build a conceptual structure of the
domain. The idea underlying the method is that when words frequently co-occur in documents, it
means that the concepts behind those words are closely related. It is the only method that uses the
actual content of the documents to construct a similarity measure, while the others connect docu-
ments indirectly through citations or co-authorships. The output of co-word analysis is a network
of themes and their relations that represent the conceptual space of a field. This semantic map helps
to understand its cognitive structure (Börner, Chen, & Boyack, 2003). A series of such maps pro-
duced for different time periods can trace the changes in this conceptual space (Coulter, Monarch, &
Konda, 1998). Co-word analysis can be applied to document titles, keywords, abstracts, or full texts. The
unit of analysis is a concept, not a document, author, or journal.
The quality of results from co-word analysis depends on variety of factors—the quality of
keywords, the scope of the database, and the sophistication of statistical methods used for analysis
(He, 1998). Solely using keywords for co-word analysis is a problem for two reasons. First, many
journals’ bibliographic data do not contain keywords. Second, relying just on keywords suffers
from so-called indexer effect—where the validity of the map is dependent on whether the indexers
captured all relevant aspects of the text. The solution is to use abstracts or full texts, but this
introduces noise into the data as the algorithms have difficulty distinguishing the importance of
words in large corpuses of text.
The current bibliometric landscape is dominated by co-citation analysis, which is used in the
majority of bibliometric studies in management and organization. Bibliographic coupling is a
neglected method with great potential for further use in the management domain. It is only after
2012 that the first three studies in management and organization using bibliographic coupling
were published (Hanisch & Wald, 2012; Nosella, Cantarello, & Filippini, 2012; Vogel & Güttel,
2013). The limited use of bibliographical coupling partially stems from historical circumstances
(co-citation analysis inventor Henry Small’s involvement with the Institute for Scientific Informa-
tion, which played a key part in the development of bibliometrics) and partly from its own limita-
tions as a method (limitation to short time spans, being unable to use citation threshold filtering).
However, it is especially useful for mapping research fronts and emerging fields where citation
data do not exist or smaller subfields that are not cited enough to produce reliable connections
by co-citation analysis.
Our search found 81 studies that used bibliometric methods in management and organization.
Two independent researchers coded and analyzed the studies to determine the methods used, the
databases, the software, and other characteristics. We describe the details of the selection and coding
436 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

and list all the studies in Appendix A. The descriptive statistics for coded categories (the methods,
databases, and software used) are summarized in Table 2.

Bibliometric Methods and Traditional Methods of Review

In recent years, the volume of scientific research increased dramatically. It is becoming increasingly
difficult for researchers to keep track of relevant literature in their field. This fact calls for the use of
quantitative bibliometric methods that can handle this wealth of data, filter the important works
through estimating their impact, and discover the underlying structure of a field. Researchers and
especially doctoral students need to be equipped with skills that are able to make sense of this infor-
mation explosion.
Traditional methods of review and evaluation of scientific literature are meta-analysis and struc-
tured literature review. Meta-analysis seeks to synthesize empirical evidence from quantitative stud-
ies (Aguinis, Pierce, Bosco, Dalton, & Dalton, 2011). It requires that the researcher chooses studies
based on the exact relationships they wish to explore (Raghuram, Tuertscher, & Garud, 2010) and
aggregates multiple findings on these relationships into one overall finding. This is a very powerful
method but inherently limited in the type and breadth of studies it can analyze. On the other hand,
structured literature reviews are able to handle the diversity of studies and methodological
approaches. Such reviews can provide in-depth analysis of literature and provide an understanding
of contextual issues (Raghuram et al., 2010). However, this process is time-consuming so the num-
ber of analyzed works is limited and prone to researcher’s biases. It is a real possibility that impor-
tant studies could be excluded.
Science mapping with bibliometric methods offers a different perspective on the field. It can ana-
lyze any type of study as long as connections among studies exist in the corpus of analyzed studies.
Compared with structured literature review, science mapping has more macro focus and aims to find
patterns in the literature as body of work. While traditional literature review provides depth, biblio-
metric methods can handle a wide breadth of hundreds, even thousands, of studies. They can provide
graphical description of a research field.
We believe bibliometric methods are not a substitute for but a complement to traditional methods
of review. Even when used in an ad hoc manner, they can provide useful information about the
research field to the researcher: which are the important publications and authors and what is the
structure of the field. Bibliometric methods can be used in standalone bibliometric analysis articles
or can provide additional information for use in structured literature reviews.
Bibliometric methods, when used correctly, can provide increased objectivity in literature
reviews. They enable the researcher to look behind the scenes and base their opinions on the aggre-
gated opinions of the scholars working in the field. Bibliometrics can help journal editors to evaluate
past publications, design new policies, and make editorial decisions. Additionally, bibliographic
data can be used as an input to other quantitative statistical methods that provide further insight and
can test hypotheses related to the structure and development of a field.

Recommended Workflow for Conducting Science Mapping Studies

Based on the established practices and bibliometric methodology literature, we propose recom-
mended workflow guidelines for science mapping research with bibliometric methods. This is not
intended to be a detailed how-to guide but an overview of the process with the options (methods,
databases, software, etc.) available to scholars and the decisions they have to make at each stage
of the research.
The recommended workflow is presented in Figure 1. We delineate a five-step procedure for con-
ducting science mapping in management and organization. First, researchers should define the
Zupic and Čater 437

Table 2. Descriptive Statistics of the 81 Bibliometric Studies Published in Management and Organization (full
list in Appendix A).

N % Sample Studies

Bibliometric method
Citation 54 66.7 Coombes and Nicholson, 2013; Durisin, Calabretta, and Parmeggiani,
2010; Martin, 2012
Co-citation 59 72.8 Pilkington and Meredith, 2009; Samiee and Chabowski, 2012; Shafique,
2013
Bibliographic coupling 3 3.7 Hanisch and Wald, 2012; Nosella, Cantarello, and Filippini, 2012; Vogel
and Güttel, 2013
Co-author 6 7.4 Acedo et al., 2006; Fischbach, Putzke, and Schoder, 2011; Raasch, Lee,
Spaeth, and Herstatt, 2013
Co-word 11 13.6 Benavides-Velasco, Quintana-Garcia, and Guzmán-Parra, 2011; Leone,
Robinson, Bragge, and Somervuori, 2012; Wallin, 2012
Multiple time periods
Yes 42 51.9 Samiee and Chabowski, 2012; Shafique, 2013; Vogel, 2012
No 39 48.1 Di Stefano, Gambardella, and Verona, 2012; Keupp, Palmié, and
Gassmann, 2012; Walter and Ribiere, 2013
Selection method
Journal 41 50.6 Pilkington and Teichert, 2006; Ramos-Rodriguez and Ruiz-Navarro,
2004; Vogel, 2012
Search 47 58.0 Chabowski, Mena, and Gonzalez-Padron, 2011; Di Stefano, Verona, and
Peteraf, 2012; Pilkington and Lawton, 2013
Qualitative 17 22.2 Backhaus, Luegger, and Koch, 2011; Keupp et al., 2012
Other 6 6.2 Acedo, Barroso, and Galan, 2006; Fagerberg, Fosaas, and Sapprasert,
2012
Database
SSCI (WOS) 56 69.1 Chabowski, Samiee, and Hult, 2013; Di Guardo and Harrigan, 2012;
Nerur, Rasheed, and Natarajan, 2008
Scopus 3 3.7 Gerdsri, Kongthon, and Vatananan, 2013; Hanisch and Wald, 2012;
Walter and Ribiere, 2013
Other 4 4.9 Charvet, Cooper, and Gardner, 2008; Gundolf and Filser, 2012; Kraus,
2011
Self-constructed 13 16.0 Bhupatiraju, Nomaler, Triulzi, and Verspagen, 2012; Fagerberg et al.,
2012; Hoffman and Holbrook, 1993
Not reported 5 6.2
Bibliometric software
BibExcel 11 13.6 Cornelius, Landstrom, and Persson, 2006; Landström, Harirchi, and
Åström, 2012; Pilkington and Chai, 2008
Sitkis 6 7.4 Raghuram, Tuertscher, and Garud, 2010; Schildt, Zahra, and Sillanpaa,
2006
Microsoft Excel 12 14.8 Kim and McMillan, 2008; Ma and Yu, 2010
Other 3 3.7 Muñoz-Leiva, Sánchez-Fernández, Liébana-Cabanillas, and Martı́nez-
Fiestas, 2013
Not reported 49 60.5
Unit of analysis
Document 45 55.6 Pilkington and Meredith, 2009; Shafique, 2013; Vogel and Güttel, 2013
Author 27 33.3 Acedo et al., 2006; Landström et al., 2012; Nerur et al., 2008; Raasch
et al., 2013
Journal 7 8.6 Vogel, 2012; Wallin, 2012
Grouping method
PCA/factor analysis 27 33.3 Reader and Watkins, 2006; Shafique, 2013; Vogel and Güttel, 2013
Clustering 21 25.9 Di Stefano, Gambardella, et al., 2012; Keupp et al., 2012; Samiee and
Chabowski, 2012
MDS 14 17.3 Chabowski et al., 2013; Di Guardo and Harrigan, 2012; Nerur et al., 2008
(continued)
438 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

Table 2. (continued)

N % Sample Studies

Network 12 14.8 Backhaus et al., 2011; Ma, Liang, Yu, and Lee, 2012; Walter and Ribiere,
2013
Visualization method
MDS 20 24.7 Chabowski et al., 2013; Cornelius and Persson, 2006; Shafique, 2013
Network analysis 34 42.0 Fagerberg et al., 2012; Pilkington and Meredith, 2009; Vogel and Güttel,
2013
Other 13 16.0 Herbst, Voeth, and Meister, 2011; Muñoz-Leiva et al., 2013
No visualization 14 17.3 Casillas and Acedo, 2007; Coombes and Nicholson, 2013; Keupp et al.,
2012
Visualization software
UCINET 21 25.9 Pilkington and Chai, 2008; Uysal, 2010; Vogel and Güttel, 2013
Pajek 4 4.9 Ronda-Pupo and Guerras-Martin, 2012; Landström et al., 2012; Wallin,
2012
Other 6 7.4 Gerdsri et al., 2013; Muñoz-Leiva et al., 2013; Walter and Ribiere, 2013
No visualization 14 17.3 Casillas and Acedo, 2007; Coombes and Nicholson, 2013; Keupp et al.,
2012
Not reported 36 44.4

Note: The percentages do not necessarily add up to 100% as studies can use multiple methods or units of analysis.

research question(s) and choose the appropriate bibliometric methods that are able to answer the
question(s). Second, researchers need to select the database that contains bibliometric data, filter
the core document set, and export the data from the selected database. Sometimes this step involves
constructing one’s own database. Third, bibliometric software is employed for analysis. Alterna-
tively, researchers can write their own computer code to accomplish this step. Results of the biblio-
metric analysis can be further analyzed with statistical software to identify document subgroups that
represent research specialties. Fourth, researchers must decide which visualization method is to be
used on the results of the third step and employ appropriate software to prepare the visualization.
Finally, the results must be interpreted and described. We have organized the article according to
these stages of the research process.

Step 1: Research Design

The first, highly important step in any bibliometric study is to design the research. Researchers
need to define the research question and choose an appropriate bibliometric method to answer
it. Different bibliometric methods are suitable for answering different research questions. We
summarized typical research questions suitable for different bibliometric methods in Table 3.
Citation is primarily a measure of impact, so the major ability of citation analysis is to find
the documents, authors, and journals that are the most influential in a particular research stream.
Co-citation analysis and bibliographical coupling use citation practices to connect documents,
authors, or journals. As such, they are ideally suitable for answering structural questions about
research fields.
Since co-citation is applied to the cited articles, it is capable of identifying the knowledge base
of a topic/research field and its intellectual structure. The knowledge base of a field is the set of
articles most cited by the current research. This is sometimes also referred to as the ‘‘intellectual
base’’ (Persson, 1994). The structure of the knowledge base is called the intellectual structure and
refers to the examined scientific domain’s research traditions, their disciplinary composition,
influential research topics, and the pattern of their interrelationships (Shafique, 2013). These
Zupic and Čater 439

Table 3. Research Questions Answered by Different Bibliometric Methods.

Citation analysis
Which authors most influenced the research in a journal?
Which journals and disciplines had the most impact on a research stream?
What is the ‘‘balance of trade’’ between journals/disciplines?
Who are the experts in a given research field?
What is the recommended ‘‘reading list’’ for a specific area?
Co-citation analysis
What is the intellectual structure of literature X?
Who are the central, peripheral, or bridging researchers in this field?
How has the diffusion of the concept through research literature taken place?
What is the structure of the scientific community in a particular field?
How has the structure of this field developed over time?
Bibliographical coupling
What is the intellectual structure of recent/emerging literature?
How does the intellectual structure of the research stream reflect the richness of the theoretical approaches?
How has the intellectual structure of small niche X developed through time?
Co-author analysis
Are authors from different disciplinary backgrounds working together on a new research field, or do they
remain within disciplinary boundaries?
Which factors determine co-authorship?
What is the effect of collaboration on the impact?
Are co-authored articles more cited?
Do more prolific authors collaborate more frequently?
Are internationally co-authored papers more cited?
What is the social structure of the field?
Co-word analysis
What are the dynamics of the conceptual structure of a field?
Uncover the conceptual building blocks of a literature.
What are the topics associated with a particular line of research?
Track the evolution of concept X.

publications are the foundations on which current research is being carried out and contain funda-
mental theories, breakthrough early works, and methodological canons of the field.
The concept of research front was introduced by Price (1965) and is used to describe current
scientific papers that cite the publications in the knowledge base. At any given time, these papers
are recently published papers that represent the state of the art of a scientific field. Examining the
research front of a topic or research field is a task particularly suitable for bibliographical coupling
since this method uses reference lists for coupling and does not require the documents to be cited
in order to connect them. It is performed on citing publications as opposed to co-citation analysis,
which is performed on cited publications. Most of the bibliometric studies in management and
organization examine the knowledge base, whereas there is a distinct lack of research front anal-
ysis. This could be attributed to the popularity of co-citation and represents an opportunity for the
use of bibliographical coupling.
Boyack and Klavans (2010) differentiate between co-citation clustering and co-citation analy-
sis. Co-citation clustering is simply the formation of clusters of cited documents, while co-citation
analysis requires the additional step of assigning the research front papers to co-citation clusters.
This latest step is most often not performed in bibliometric studies. One of the problems with
co-citation clustering is that the analyzed set of documents (co-cited documents) is not the same
as the starting set of documents (core documents). Consequently, co-citation clustering is more
440 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

appropriate for studying the intellectual foundations of research than for evaluating the current
research frontier. Publications in co-citation clusters can be connected to the research front pub-
lications that are citing them. Unfortunately, most bibliometric software does not have this capa-
bility, so it has to be done manually. One way to do this is to import bibliometric data into a
relational database and find the research front publications that are responsible for co-citation
links in each cluster through search queries. Co-citation can be used to examine the research front
of a specified domain, but because it requires an intermediate step of matching cited and citing
clusters, the resulting research front clusters will contain more noise than when derived from bib-
liographical coupling.
Co-author analysis is particularly suitable for studying research questions involving scientific
collaboration. This method can analyze co-authorship patterns among contributing scientists and
produce a social network of the invisible college that makes up the research field. Researchers can
combine co-authorship data with citation data to estimate the effect of collaboration on research
impact. For instance, Fischbach, Putzke, and Schoder (2011) examined co-authorship networks
within the Electronic Markets journal to test various hypotheses of how authors’ embeddedness
in co-authorship networks affects the impact of their research. Establishing an author’s disciplin-
ary background can reveal interdisciplinary collaborations. Raasch, Lee, Spaeth, and Herstatt
(2013) studied the emergence of open-source innovation research to find that interdisciplinarity
decreases when the research field becomes established. Co-word analysis uses the text of the titles,
author-designated keywords, abstracts, or even full texts to construct a semantic map of the field.
This method can be used to discover linkages among subjects in a research field and trace its
development (He, 1998).
Science mapping is performed at a specific point in time to represent a static picture of the field
at that moment. However, the core document set can be divided into multiple time periods to cap-
ture the development of the field over time. Each time period’s bibliometric data are analyzed sep-
arately and compared to find changes in the field’s structure. This longitudinal analysis can reveal
how particular groups within an intellectual structure emerge, grow, or fade away.
While these are the most basic types of research questions, the authors of bibliometric studies
have started to examine more sophisticated variants of questions. Some authors have considered
differences in publication and citation practices between authors from different geographical
regions, particularly between the North American and European traditions (Cornelius & Persson,
2006; Pilkington & Lawton, 2013; Usdiken & Pasadeos, 1995). Bibliometric methods can uncover
influences about which even field experts might be unaware. Researchers often draw on publica-
tions from outside the field, but these publications are rarely mentioned in literature reviews
(White & McCain, 1998), which are discipline-focused. Therefore, some recent studies tried
to reveal the interdisciplinarity of particular research streams (e.g., Bernroider, Pilkington, &
Córdoba, 2013; Raasch et al., 2013).

Step 2: Compiling the Bibliometric Data

One of the crucial decisions authors of science mapping studies must make is how to limit the
scope of their study and define which papers should be included in the set of core documents. Two
main options for limiting the scope are available. The first is to search for selected keywords.
Because not all journals publish keywords, the search should include article titles and abstracts.
Special effort should be made to define search terms that accurately represent the examined field.
To increase the validity of search terms, consulting a panel of scholars to determine appropriate
keywords is a good practice (e.g., Chabowski, Samiee, & Hult, 2013). However, even when search
terms are very carefully chosen, a database search usually finds studies that are not within the
scope of the review. These unwanted publications influence the results of bibliometric analysis,
Zupic and Čater 441

introduce outliers into the cited publications, and reduce the validity of the results. A method to
sift out unwanted documents is needed. This can be dealt with by reading abstracts and qualita-
tively determining which publications returned by the search are within the scope of the review.
However, this method has the potential to introduce bias into the results. This bias can be mitigated
by (a) defining beforehand the exact criteria used for selection and (b) having at least two
researchers independently perform the selection.
The second option is to limit the scope to articles published in a single or in a small number of
journals. This selection method is especially appropriate when the goal is to analyze the publica-
tions within a single journal or when the publications in selected specialty journals represent a
valid representation of the examined research field. Of course, these methods can be combined
to perform a keyword search within a limited range of journals and qualitatively select the publi-
cations for bibliometric analysis. An interesting variation of selection is the approach introduced
by Fagerberg, Landström, and Martin (2012), which relies on citations from handbooks from the
fields of innovation, entrepreneurship, and science studies to define the core set of documents in
each field.
When the core document set has been selected, authors often exclusively use documents or
journals that exceed some minimum citation threshold for the purpose of selecting only influential
publications and limiting the core document set to a manageable size. This is sometimes necessary
when bibliographic coupling or co-author analysis are used that perform the analysis on citing
publications (i.e., the core document set). If the threshold is established on the number of total cita-
tions, newer publications are at a disadvantage, so a better practice would be to rank publications
on citations per year. While co-word analysis is also performed on citing publications, the unit of
analysis is a word, which means that thresholds should be established for word appearance.
Co-citation analysis is performed on cited publications, which can be very numerous. Filtering
through citation thresholds is thus also necessary on cited publications for two reasons: (a) to limit
the analyzed set to a manageable size and (b) to ensure only cited publications that contain enough
citation data for analysis are retained. If publications are not cited or are cited just a few times, it is
not possible to perform a co-citation analysis, so in this case, filtering through the total number of
citations is appropriate. Establishing the level of citation thresholds is a part of bibliometric anal-
ysis that is definitely more art than science. The choice also depends on whether the goal of the
researcher is analysis of a wider, more inclusive set of cited publications or of a smaller, more
focused selection. If the cited publications are selected too narrowly, some smaller subgroups will
not be found.

Bibliographic Databases
The Social Science Citation Index, accessible online through Thomson Reuters Web of Science, is
by far the most common source of bibliographic data. It provides data on documents published in
the social sciences and the cited references they contain. Bibliographical data for indexed docu-
ments including article title, article type, authors, author institutional affiliations, keywords,
abstract, number of citations, journal name, publisher name and address, publication year, volume,
issue number, and a list of cited references is available for analysis. All journals indexed in SSCI
are assigned one or more subject categories (e.g., Economics, Psychology) that can be used for
filtering relevant publications. The SSCI was established by the Institute for Scientific Informa-
tion (ISI), which is now part of Thomson Reuters. However, it is not without its limitations: The
scope of journals covered by the SSCI is limited to those with an official impact factor. It takes
time for newer journals to be included in the SSCI, so it does not contain data from ‘‘just
launched’’ publications. The SSCI (WOS) database is the most frequently used database for bib-
liometric studies in management and organization. It contains enough data to make it suitable for
442 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

most bibliometric analysis and is already included in most university subscriptions, so it is imme-
diately available to researchers working in academic settings.
An alternative source is the Scopus database. Started in 2004 and owned by Elsevier, it is rec-
ommended by some bibliometricians as having a wider coverage than the SSCI (SciTech Strate-
gies, 2012). This broader coverage is useful for mapping smaller research areas that would be
insufficiently covered by the SSCI (WOS) database. The importing of data from Scopus is sup-
ported by the most commonly used bibliometric software packages, but its use is not yet wide-
spread among management and organization scholars as Scopus was employed by only three
studies (cf. Gerdsri, Kongthon, & Vatananan, 2013; Hanisch & Wald, 2012; Walter & Ribiere,
2013). An additional advantage of Scopus is that it contains data for all authors in cited references,
making author-based citation and co-citation analysis more accurate.
Google Scholar has gained prominence among academics since it has become the most widely
used tool for searching scientific publications. Google Scholar includes a broader range of pub-
lications than SSCI (WOS) and includes citation data, so it is a potentially useful database for
bibliometric analysis. However, Google Scholar does not provide a user interface or API (appli-
cation programming interface) to enable the exporting of a document set with cited references,
which would be needed for bibliometric analysis. It would be potentially feasible to write a pro-
gram that would download the data from Google Scholar, but Google’s policy is to not allow auto-
matic downloading, so this approach is not stable and bound to be blocked by Google. Due to these
shortcomings, Google Scholar currently cannot be easily used for bibliometric analysis.
Some limitations of bibliometric methods are the consequence of the nature of data in biblio-
graphic databases. The cited reference data from the SSCI only contain information about the first
authors of cited publications, meaning that the contributions of second and other authors are under-
estimated. This is especially noticeable in some seminal, highly cited co-authored contributions (e.g.,
Dan Levinthal is the second author of the highly cited 1990 Cohen & Levinthal absorptive capacity
paper; this omission alone is enough to produce a biased list of top cited authors). The SSCI does not
cover all scientific literature—some relevant journals are not included. They do not encompass work-
ing papers and papers published in open archives like arXiv and SSRN. Important contributions could
be missed as a consequence of this insufficient coverage. Another alternative to established online
databases is for researchers to construct their own database based on several different sources.

Step 3: Analysis
The analysis begins with preprocessing. To achieve accurate results, it is necessary to clean the data.
Although most bibliometric data are reliable, cited references sometimes contain multiple versions
of the same publication and different spellings of an author’s names. Moreover, since authors are
usually abbreviated by their surname and first initial, this poses a problem with some very common
names (e.g., Lee, Smith) and authors with two first names (e.g., David Bruce Audretsch could appear
as both ‘‘Audretsch D.’’ and ‘‘Audretsch D. B.’’). Cited journals might also appear in slightly dif-
ferent forms. Books have different editions, which can appear as different citations (e.g., Yin’s
‘‘Case Study Research: Design and Methods’’ could appear as Yin, 1984; Yin, 1994; or even Yin,
2009). While the choice of whether to aggregate different editions of books remains for the
researcher, different spellings of authors and journals should be corrected when these are the units
of analysis. Researchers should aggregate author or journal data under one spelling and eliminate all
the others. This is especially important for author and journal co-citation analysis, co-author analysis,
and citation analysis. Corrections can be made with more sophisticated tools that allow calculating
similarities between text strings or through capabilities of bibliometric software packages.
When performing co-word analysis, it is often desirable to reduce various representations of con-
cepts to one form. A stemming algorithm is the procedure that transforms words to their root form.
Zupic and Čater 443

For example, the concept of ‘‘innovation’’ could appear in several forms: innovation (singular),
innovations (plural), innovativeness (noun), innovative (adjective), and so on. A stemming algo-
rithm would reduce all these different appearances to the root ‘‘innov’’, which would represent the
concept of innovation. As demonstrated here, stemmed words can be difficult to read for humans, so
replacing the root with the most common full word is advisable.

Bibliometric Software
Several software tools are available to facilitate the bibliometric analysis of scientific literature.
Bibliometric tools take raw bibliographic data (e.g., an export from Web of Science), perform bib-
liometric calculations, and calculate the similarity matrices between items (documents, authors,
journals, words). They have some analytic capabilities but normally rely on exporting data for sta-
tistical and visualization software for further analysis. In this section, we will briefly introduce
three bibliometric tools: BibExcel (Persson, Danell, & Wiborg Schneider, 2009), Sitkis (Schildt
et al., 2006), and SciMAT (Cobo et al., 2012). BibExcel and Sitkis were the tools most often refer-
enced in bibliometric analyses. Interestingly, several studies report using Microsoft Excel to per-
form bibliometric calculations.
BibExcel was developed by Olle Persson (Persson et al., 2009) and is the software most used for
performing bibliometric analysis in management and organization. Although its user interface can-
not be described as being very friendly, it can be learned quickly and is very efficient. BibExcel can
perform all bibliometric methods (co-citation, bibliographical coupling, co-author, and co-word
analysis) and has many additional features (e.g., word stemmer to aid co-word analysis). Its website
contains many tutorials on how to use the software for various bibliometric analyses. Exporting
options include co-occurrence matrices for later use in statistical software and network formats that
can be used in network analysis packages. BibExcel is easy to learn and very quick to operate. Its
main drawbacks are the lack of advanced preprocessing capabilities for data cleaning and its quirky
user interface. If the goal of the researcher is to produce quick bibliometric calculations and perform
data cleaning and advanced analysis in other programs, BibExcel is the right choice.
Sitkis (Schildt, 2005) was developed by Henri A. Schildt at the Helsinki University of Tech-
nology. It is a bibliometric data management tool that can be used for aiding reviews and biblio-
metric calculations. With Sitkis it is possible to perform basic data preprocessing tasks and perform
co-citation and co-author analysis. Data can be exported to tab-delimited Excel-friendly text files that
can also be used in UCINET network analysis software. One distinct feature of Sitkis is that it imple-
ments a dense network subgrouping algorithm—a clustering procedure developed especially for bib-
liometric analysis (Schildt & Mattsson, 2006). The tool is relatively simple to use but uses legacy
technology (Access) for database storage and is no longer being actively developed. The last version
of this software dates from 2005. We would thus recommend using this software option predomi-
nantly if a researcher already has Sitkis experience.
SciMAT (Cobo et al., 2012) is one of the newer additions to bibliometric software options. Devel-
oped by a research group at the University of Granada, SciMAT is software that covers the whole
workflow of science mapping from data preprocessing to visualization. It has a better user interface
and superior preprocessing capabilities for cleaning the data and is a more recent and open source. It
guides the user through whole workflow, being in this sense more rigid than BibExcel. It is good
software for carrying out a thorough science mapping procedure, but it is more difficult to do ‘‘quick
and dirty’’ ad hoc analyses in SciMAT. Its main drawback is the current lack of a user interface to
export data matrices that could be used in statistical software. Users can export the data for further
analyses only through (undocumented) scripts or limit the analyses to those done in SciMAT.
At least two other software options are worth mentioning. Loet Leydesdorff’s website stores a num-
ber of simple software programs that implement various bibliometric methods (Leydesdorff, 1999).
444 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

These are very basic programs run from the command line that transform WOS data into matrices that
can be used in statistical and network analysis software. Its use is very simple, but its preprocessing
capabilities are very limited. CiteSpace II (Chen, 2006) is another option with comprehensive bibliometric
capabilities. It has many features far beyond what is needed for basic science mapping, but the learning
curve is pretty steep. For a comprehensive analysis of available bibliometric software and their features,
see Cobo et al. (2011b).

Identifying Subfields
Identifying subfields with quantitative analysis is one of the biggest strengths of bibliometric meth-
ods. Various dimensionality reduction techniques are applied. The most common are exploratory
factor analysis, cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling (MDS), and network analysis community
finding algorithms (Cobo et al., 2012). Researchers are advised to use several grouping methods
simultaneously to check the robustness of the results.
Exploratory factor analysis, cluster analysis, and multidimensional scaling require a similarity matrix
(produced with bibliometric software) as an input for statistical software (e.g., SPSS, Stata, R). Biblio-
metric software produces a co-occurrence frequency matrix in which the elements of the matrix are
co-citations (for co-citation analysis), shared reference counts (for bibliographical coupling), number
of co-authored papers (for co-author analysis), or word co-occurrences (for co-word analysis). However,
normalized similarity measures are often preferred to raw co-occurrence counts, for example, Pearson’s
r, Salton’s cosine, and Jaccard index. These measures normalize the matrix and compensate for different
occurrence levels among items. Normalization is especially recommended for cluster analysis as it is
sensitive to scaling issues, but exploratory factor analysis and MDS benefit from normalization as well.
Network analysis algorithms also use network topology to find network subgroups and can work with
raw co-occurrence counts, so normalization of a similarity measure is not necessary (Wallace, Gingras,
& Duhon, 2009).
The similarity measure most often used is Pearson’s r correlation. However, its use has been the
subject of considerable controversy in bibliometric methodological literature. Ahlgren, Jarneving,
and Rousseau (2003) claimed that Pearson’s r does not satisfy mathematical requirements for a
good similarity measure and suggested that other measures should be preferred. However, White
(2003) showed that for practical purposes Pearson’s r is a valid and robust measure of similarity
for the purpose of mapping research specialties that consistently produces interpretable maps.
Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with principal component analysis (PCA) as an extraction
method is one of the most frequently used techniques for finding subgroups in bibliometric studies.
Since no theoretical relationships between factors are expected in advance, PCA as an extraction
method is appropriate (Conway & Huffcutt, 2003) but requires the researcher to specify the number
of factors in advance. Several methods exist for choosing the number of factors: scree test, Kaiser’s
criterion, and others. We suggest using these methods just as a starting point. Choosing the number
of factors is a substantive as well as a statistical issue (Fabrigar, Wegener, MacCallum, & Strahan,
1999). Several solutions with various factors should be examined to determine their interpretability/
practicality before the number of factors is determined. If too few factors are used, the latent struc-
ture is not revealed, while if too many factors are used, it becomes difficult to interpret the findings.
Accordingly, several trials should be performed to arrive at the best representation of the data.
One advantage of EFA is that because items (documents, authors, journals, words) can load on to
more than one factor, it can demonstrate the breadth of contributions that span multiple factors.
Important work is also often universal, so it would be assigned to multiple subgroups of publications
(Börner et al., 2003). Items with loadings greater than 0.7 should be regarded as core contributions to
that factor, and loadings larger than 0.4 should be reported as factor members (McCain, 1990). There
are two types of rotation methods in FA: orthogonal and oblique. Orthogonal rotation assumes that
Zupic and Čater 445

factors are not correlated and works best when factors are independent (Zhao & Strotmann, 2008).
Oblique rotation is useful when factors are correlated and can produce a component correlation
matrix to indicate the degree of correlation between factors. Because bibliographic data represent
subgroups of a research specialty, we can reasonably expect factors to be correlated (McCain,
1990), but if factors are uncorrelated, orthogonal and oblique rotations will give similar results
(Conway & Huffcutt, 2003). Therefore, oblique rotation is the preferred method when dealing
with bibliographic data.
Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) is another frequently used technique for finding subgroups.
This method produces a dendogram based on the similarity of analyzed items; the choice of where
to cut the dendogram to produce clusters is left to the researcher. HCA has no generally accepted
stopping rules to guide the researcher to the best set of clusters (McCain, 1990). There is a variety
of HCA procedures: single linkage, complete linkage, average linkage, Ward’s method. Of these,
Ward’s method is the most frequently used for bibliometric analysis. McCain (1990) found that
both complete linkage and Ward’s method produce similar and interpretable results. Because all
analyzed items are contained in the solution, filtering of unwanted items beforehand is necessary.
Using absolute citation counts in a matrix is less appropriate for clustering algorithms as they pro-
duce a network in which the most cited publications dominate (Gmür, 2003).
Multidimensional scaling (MDS) can analyze any kind of similarity matrix. It produces a map of
objects in a low- (usually two-) dimensional space by optimizing distances between objects to reflect
a similarity measure. Items regarded as more similar are presented as closer on the map. The items,
however, are not explicitly assigned to groups; this decision is left to the researcher. MDS is limited
to small data sets as big maps become increasingly difficult to read and interpret. It does not produce
explicit links between objects, and its major drawback is that there are no firm rules to interpret the
nature of the resulting dimensions (Börner et al., 2003). Compared with other methods for identify-
ing subfields in this section, MDS has serious limitations and few relative advantages.
Network community finding algorithms have made several important advances in recent years
due to the explosion of interest in the Internet, which can be analyzed with social network analysis
methods. However, these advances are still not being exploited in bibliometric studies to a full
extent, so network analysis algorithms continue to hold huge potential for the future. In this sec-
tion, we will describe two effective community finding algorithms: the Louvain method (Blondel,
Guillaume, Lambiotte, & Lefebvre, 2008) and the Islands algorithm (Zaveršnik & Batagelj, 2004).
Several other network community finding methods exist that have not yet been used in biblio-
metric studies. For a detailed and comprehensive treatment of the various network community
finding methods, see Fortunato (2010).
The Louvain method (Blondel et al., 2008) has been found to be very fast for large networks and
to provide excellent accuracy (Liu, Glänzel, & Moor, 2012). This method uses the notion of net-
work modularity, which measures the meaningfulness of network division into communities. The
Louvain algorithm starts with assigning each node to separate community. It then iterates through
all communities, checking whether adding a node from one community to another causes an
increase in modularity and choosing the change with greatest increase in modularity. It repeats the
process until there is no change in community structure. The method works very well on co-
citation networks and can be used on extremely large networks. The limitation of the Louvain
method is that it assigns all network nodes to groups, so item filtering to include only important
items is necessary beforehand. Sometimes there are items in the network that substantially do not
belong to any group but are assigned one anyhow or the method produces artifacts—groups with
just one node.
The Islands algorithm (Zaveršnik & Batagelj, 2004) can be illustrated with a mountain range sub-
merged in water (in our case, the height of the mountains represents similarity strength between units
of analysis—documents, authors, journals, or words). When the water is drained, the highest peak
446 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

appears as an island first, and then the lower peaks gradually emerge. These islands represent clus-
ters of highly similar items. An important advantage of this algorithm is that it can uncover groups of
publications with varying degrees of link intensity. In case of co-citation links, it enables less cited
groups of items to be uncovered. In summary, a group of items represents a peak within a mountain
range when within-group similarity links are stronger than those with out-of-group publications. The
main advantage of the Islands algorithm is that the found groups (islands) are only a subset of the
whole network, and so it is not necessary to limit the number of items beforehand. The groups that
are found are very dense and cohesive but are usually smaller than those found with other methods
because only the strongest members are included.
Exploratory factor analysis, cluster analysis, and MDS provide complementary, often reinfor-
cing results when used on the same or related similarity matrices (McCain, 1990). Several
researchers found very consistent results when applying cluster analysis and exploratory factor
analysis to the same bibliometric data (e.g., Di Stefano, Gambardella, & Verona, 2012; Samiee &
Chabowski, 2012). The advantage of exploratory factor analysis over cluster analysis is that it does
not force objects into groups (clusters) but is able to accommodate the universality of work, which
can belong to multiple factors. This property of exploratory factor analysis can make a clear deli-
mitation of subgroups difficult, but it can identify publications that serve as boundary spanners
between different subtopics of research. However, Gmür (2003) found that factor analysis in the
conditions of high structural complexity does not generate a true representation of co-citation clusters.
Network analysis methods are a fresh approach to finding subgroups that has yet to take hold in biblio-
metric studies. We believe network analysis methods have several advantages that make them worth
using: they are effective and accurate, do not require normalization of similarity matrices (so researchers
can avoid the controversy over which similarity measure to choose), and the analysis can be done within
the same software tool that is used for visualization.

Step 4: Visualization
The map of a field is primarily a visualization of its network structure. Traditionally, multidimen-
sional scaling was the approach most often used for visualizing bibliometric data (White & McCain,
1998). MDS is a technique for creating maps from proximity matrices so that an underlying structure
can be studied (McCain, 1990). However, MDS is gradually being supplanted by network analysis
visualization methods.
Network analysis produces visualizations of scientific fields in which network nodes represent
units of analysis (e.g., documents, authors, journals, words) and network ties represent similarity
connections. More strongly connected nodes are drawn closer together. Depending on the unit of
analysis, several different types of maps of a scientific field can be constructed. The most common
are maps based on documents. Author-based maps are also widespread (Börner et al., 2003) and
come in two forms: Author co-citation maps are constructed to represent the intellectual structure
of a field, while co-authorship maps are used to reveal the structure of scientific networks based
on collaborations. Finally, semantic maps (i.e., co-word analyses) can be used to represent the
cognitive structure of a field.
Showing different units of analysis is possible on the same map with two-mode networks, but
this has been used very rarely. An exception is Vogel (2012) where an innovative map of an entire
management discipline featured connections among research field subgroups (document groups
collapsed into clusters) and scientific journals. Zhao and Strotmann (2008) presented an alterna-
tive visualization of a research field in a two-mode network, where subgroups found by PCA are
represented as type 1 nodes connected to the authors (type 2 nodes). Authors could be connected to
several subgroups.
Zupic and Čater 447

The choice of layout algorithm determines the aesthetics and usefulness of network drawing.
The most common layout algorithms are Kamada-Kawai and Fruchterman-Reingold. Both are
members of the spring-embedder family of algorithms (Kobourov, 2012). These are typically use-
ful for small networks (Boyack & Klavans, 2014) because the graph layouts generally have many
local minima, which makes it difficult for algorithms to produce good layouts of large graphs.
Fruchterman-Reingold aims to keep adjacent nodes close together, while Kamada-Kawai takes
a graph-theoretic approach. It tries to minimize the difference between geometric distances
between two nodes in a network drawing and the graph-theoretic pairwise distances. The latter
are determined by the shortest path between the nodes. One recommended option is to first use
the Kamada-Kawai algorithm for an approximate layout and to subsequently employ the
Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm to improve the drawing (Collberg, Kobourov, Nagra, Pitts, &
Wampler, 2003).
Network analysis software can calculate centrality measures (e.g., degree, betweenness,
closeness). These measures have different meanings depending on the network analyzed. In a
co-authorship network, an author’s degree centrality represents how many other authors have writ-
ten a paper with him (Fischbach et al., 2011). High betweenness centrality is an indicator that an
author is a bridge between different research streams. Authors scoring high on closeness centrality
can reach other authors in the network through a shorter chain.
With the advancement of network analysis tools we see no compelling reason to continue using
MDS for visualization purposes. Network analysis software can produce MDS-like visualizations
but has many more options and features to choose from. The software packages most often used for
network visualization are UCINET (Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002) and Pajek (Batagelj &
Mrvar, 1998). Both of these software tools have a long history and a large number of features. Their
main drawback is the limited number of community finding algorithms that are implemented in
these packages. In addition, their speed of development is slower compared to open-source tools like
Gephi and the R iGraph package.
Gephi is open-source network analysis and visualization software that is fast gaining traction
in the social network analysis community. Its rapid development is due to its open-source
nature and because it is more easily extendable than other options. Another visualization option
is the statistical software R with its powerful iGraph package (also available in Python). A big
advantage of iGraph package is that it has already implemented a large number of community
finding algorithms. R is also a very flexible environment that can handle very different analysis
tasks including PCA, MDS, and/or cluster analysis. Producing basic bibliometric calculations in
specific bibliometric software and handling all other analysis in R is a very powerful and flex-
ible option.
One challenge researchers face is how to visualize the changes in the research field through
several time periods. A good option to represent these changes is a bar graph, where each row rep-
resents a publication in the intellectual structure and the width of a bar left or right from the zero
axis represents whether this publication was more or less influential than in the previous period. A
good example of the use of this graph can be found in Shafique (2013, p. 74). When implementing
co-word analysis, an additional option for visualization of the conceptual structure of a field are
graphs called heat maps. These maps use warmer colors and bolded fonts to emphasize concepts
that are frequently used, while words that are used only sporadically are shown in colder colors
and subdued smaller fonts. An example of a heat map is shown in Figure 3, which visualizes the
words in abstracts of research papers dealing with the high-tech firms published in management
journals between 1973 and 1998. Two large groups of words can be distinguished: The first deals
with the role of high-tech firms in economic growth, the second shows the words related to the
management of high-tech firms.
448 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

Figure 3. Co-word analysis of abstracts of research papers on the topic of management in high-tech firms
published in 1973 to 1998.

Step 5: Interpretation
The final step in bibliometric analysis is to interpret the findings. Bibliometrics is no substitute for
extensive reading in the field. Documents that appear in the analysis need to be thoroughly exam-
ined to reach valid conclusions. Researchers with in-depth knowledge of the field have a distinc-
tive advantage here. However, they need to be careful not to try to fit the analysis to their existing
preconceptions, but the opposite: to use their knowledge to enhance the findings. Bibliometric
methods will often reveal the structure of a field differently from the classification of traditional
literature reviews, so these differences need to be reconciled. Science maps provide a starting
point for analytical examination but are not an end in itself. Interpretation strategies in biblio-
metric analysis are dependent on the focus of the paper authors are writing. We argue there are
three major types of focus bibliometric papers can have: focus on structure, focus on dynamics,
and focus on a narrow research question.
The first type of paper focuses on structure. The aim is to analyze the relations among structural
elements (groups of publications, authors, concepts), find how they relate and influence each
other, and examine their role in substantive questions the research field asks. Focus on dynamics
is the second type of paper that can employ bibliometric methods. The goal of this type of paper is
to track the development of a research field through time. Researchers should divide the biblio-
graphic data into several multiyear periods and take snapshots of the structure of the field for each
interval. Interpretation strategy would then try to explain how the structure changed and why this
happened. It would determine which elements are new in a certain period and which are in decline.
A good example of this type of focus is Vogel (2012), who tracked the development of the
management discipline over several decades. His study used co-citation and network analysis
to identify the theoretical perspectives that were dominant in each decade.
An alternative type of paper is a focused paper with a very specific research question. Typi-
cally, these papers will have a small empirical bibliometric part that is used to illustrate or
prove authors’ claims and extensive discussion of the relation of these claims with existing lit-
erature. An example of a focused question would be ‘‘Is research stream X over-reliant on
Zupic and Čater 449

theoretical perspective Y?’’ Researchers could then use citation analysis to prove that the
research in field X is indeed highly influenced by the theoretical perspective Y and that refer-
ences to other potentially useful theoretical perspectives are few or nonexistent. Other research
goals could fall under this focus type. For instance, Volberda, Foss, and Lyles (2010) used bib-
liometric methods to investigate contextual factors that affect absorptive capacity and develop
an integrative model that identifies the multilevel antecedents, process dimensions, and out-
comes of absorptive capacity.

The Intellectual Structure of Organizational Research Methods

To demonstrate the use of bibliometric methods, we performed a bibliometric analysis of the Orga-
nizational Research Methods (ORM) journal. All steps necessary to reproduce this analysis are
detailed in Appendix B. Readers can also repeat the analysis on their own data by following the steps
with data of their chosen research field.
We set out to examine the intellectual structure of the ORM journal. Our expectation was that this
investigation would reveal which research methods are dominant within organizational research. We
decided to use citation and co-citation analysis. With citation analysis, we aimed to find the most
influential documents (books or articles) that were referenced in ORM. Co-citation data provided
the structure of the knowledge base of ORM.
We searched the Web of Science database for ‘‘Organizational Research Methods’’ in the pub-
lication name. The search returned 483 articles, but the analysis based on publication years revealed
that the data for 1999 and 2000 were missing, so we decided to only use published articles from 2001
to 2014, covering almost 15 years. Limiting the search to that time period left us with 465 entries that
formed the data sample for our analysis.
We exported the bibliographic data with cited references for these 465 articles and imported it
into BibExcel software for bibliometric analysis. We calculated the list of the most cited documents
and the most cited journals in BibExcel. Having the list of the most cited journals, we proceeded to
clean the citation data as journal names often appear in different forms in bibliographic databases.
We found four instances where the journal short name was duplicated and adjusted the citation
counts accordingly.
Next step in the process was choosing the cutoff point to limit the number of documents for
co-citation analysis. Co-citation is not performed on the core documents (i.e., the 465 articles
published in ORM) but on the documents cited by these. Limiting the scope of documents for
co-citation analysis is a judgment call that tries to balance two competing objectives: providing
as broad a representation of the intellectual structure as possible versus providing a more focused,
clean representation. If we limit the articles too much (i.e., choose a citation cutoff point too high),
we risk missing some smaller groups of publications that are perhaps less cited but nevertheless
important. If we set the cutoff point too low, we get another set of problems. Bigger groups of
documents are harder to visualize. Less cited documents carry less information for co-citation
analysis, which increases the probability for spurious co-citation connections. After several trials
with different cutoff points, we decided to limit our analysis to 112 documents cited nine or more
times by the articles published in the ORM journal.
We calculated the co-citation data and exported it to the Pajek network analysis software for fur-
ther analysis and visualization. Applying the Louvain community finding algorithm in Pajek, we
found 11 subgroups of cited publications that represent the intellectual structure of the ORM journal.
We visualized the networks in Pajek with the Kamada-Kawai algorithm. We report the results of our
analysis in the following sections.
450 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

Table 4. Most Cited Documents in Organizational Research Methods.

Citations Document

31 Cohen J, 1988, Stat Power Anal Beha

27 Nunnally J, 1994, Psychometric Theory
27 Cohen J, 2003, Appl Multiple Regres
26 Bollen K. A, 1989, Structural Equations
24 Raudenbush S, 2002, Hierarchical Linear
23 Campbell D, 1959, V56, P81, Psychol Bull
22 Cohen J, 1983, Appl Multiple Regres
21 Vandenberg Robert J, 2000, V3, P4, Organ Res Methods
21 Chan D, 1998, V83, P234, J Appl Psychol
21 James L, 1984, V69, P85, J Appl Psychol
20 Nunnally J C, 1978, Psychometric Theory
20 Baron R, 1986, V51, P1173, J Pers Soc Psychol
20 Cook T D, 1979, Quasiexperimentation
20 Scandura T, 2000, V43, P1248, Acad Manage J
19 Bliese P D, 2000, P349, Multilevel Theory Re
19 Gephart R, 2004, V47, P454, Acad Manage J
19 Aiken L S, 1991, Multiple Regression
18 Kozlowski S, 2000, P3, Multilevel Theory Re
18 Glaser B G, 1967, Discovery Grounded T
18 Chan D, 1998, V1, P421, Organ Res Methods
18 Hu L, 1999, V6, P1, Struct Equ Modeling
18 Hunter J E, 2004, Methods Metaanalysis
16 Bryk A S, 1992, Hierarchical Linear
15 Aguinis H, 2005, V90, P94, J Appl Psychol
14 Podsakoff P, 2003, V88, P879, J Appl Psychol
14 Eisenhardt K, 1989, V14, P532, Acad Manage Rev
14 Lance C, 2006, V9, P202, Organ Res Methods

Citation Analysis
The most cited documents by articles published in ORM are presented in Table 4. A glance at
the list reveals the knowledge base of ORM and provides hints about the topical structure of
ORM, which we will further investigate with co-citation analysis. The most cited document is
Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (Cohen, 1988), with 31 citations. The top
of the list is dominated by books on psychometric theory, linear regression, and multilevel anal-
ysis. We can see that some books appear in several editions; for example, both 1978 and 1994
editions of Nunnaly’s Psychometric Theory are featured on the list. Other works include seminal
works on grounded theory, meta-analysis, and structural equation modeling. Note that the way
documents are represented in this table is the data that represent the reference list in the SSCI
(WOS) database.
The most cited journals in ORM are shown in Table 5. We see that the most cited journal is the
Journal of Applied Psychology with 1,637 citations, almost twice as many as the second on the
list, which is ORM. Perhaps surprisingly for a methods journal, most of the top of the list is taken
up by top-tier management journals (Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management
Journal, Journal of Management), which is an indicator of the disciplinary breadth of ORM. Most
numerous on the list, however, are psychology journals, meaning that methods for micro manage-
ment (psychology, organizational behavior, and human resources) research are forming a large
share of topics in ORM.
Zupic and Čater 451

Table 5. Most Cited Journals in Organizational Research Methods.

Citations Journal

1,637 Journal of Applied Psychology

888 Organizational Research Methods
823 Academy of Management Journal
557 Strategic Management Journal
509 Journal of Management
490 Psychological Bulletin
478 Personnel Psychology
439 Academy of Management Review
354 Administrative Science Quarterly
337 Psychological Methods
223 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
184 Educational and Psychological Measurement
184 American Psychologist
183 Journal of Organizational Behavior
182 Applied Psychological Measurement
175 Psychometrika
173 Organization Science
170 Multivariate Behavioral Research
156 Structural Equation Modeling
136 Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Proc
123 Journal of International Business Studies
113 Psychological Review
109 Journal of Management Studies

Co-Citation Analysis
After experimenting with several parameters for the Louvain algorithm that determine the gran-
ularity of groups, we settled on an 11-group solution. The algorithm originally found 15 groups,
but 4 groups contained only one element of non-methods origin—seminal works of Porter, Weick,
and DiMaggio—so we decided to treat these 4 groups as outliers and report only the first 11.
The first three groups of intellectual structure represent the knowledge base of multilevel research
methods. We labeled these groups multilevel theory, interrater reliability and agreement (IRR &
IRA), and multilevel analysis (Figures 4–6). The cohesion and breadth of these groups indicate that
debates about multilevel methods are one of the most important themes in ORM.
The fourth group contains articles and books on psychometric measurement theory and structural
equation modeling (Figure 7). The group on relative predictor importance (Figure 8) is one of the
smaller and deals with estimating the importance of predictors in multiple regression. This group
is separated from one of the largest groups that deals with multiple regression (shown in Figure 9).
We labeled the subsequent groups measurement invariance, validity and method variance, and
qualitative research (Figures 10–12). The 10th group (Figure 13) is peculiar because it shows two
different topics: Half of the groups contain debates about the relevance of management theory, while
the other half is dedicated to meta-analysis. The 11th group is the smallest, with three items on the
topic of missing data (Figure 14).
What might be the conclusions from this brief analysis? High citations to psychology journals
suggest methods issues in micro research are dominant in the conversations in the ORM, although
the evidence from citation rates of Strategic Management Journal and some co-citation groups
reveal that ORM also caters to debates in macro fields (e.g., strategy).
Out of 11 groups, only 1 is about qualitative research, meaning that quantitative methods are still
the bread and butter of organizational research. Quantitative conversations are mostly centered on
452 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

Figure 4. Multilevel theory.

Figure 5. Interrater reliability and agreement.

Zupic and Čater 453

Figure 6. Multilevel analysis.

Figure 7. Measurement theory and structural equation modeling.

454 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

Figure 8. Relative predictor importance.

Figure 9. Multiple regression.

Zupic and Čater 455

Figure 10. Measurement invariance.

Figure 11. Validity and method variance.

456 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

Figure 12. Qualitative methods.

Figure 13. Meta-analysis and management theory.

Zupic and Čater 457

Figure 14. Missing data.

either measurement or analysis problems, while theory issues are the focus of two found groups.
Most of our results are consistent with the content analysis of the first decade of ORM journal
(Aguinis, Pierce, Bosco, & Muslin, 2009). However, our findings suggest that the importance
of multilevel research methods has gained in prominence in the seven years since the end of the
period analyzed by Aguinis and colleagues (2009). Additionally, our analysis can be used as an aid
for assigning readings in methods doctoral courses. We identified the most impactful methods
publications that are used by the members of ORM community who expressed their opinions by
citing these documents.

Conclusion
Bibliometric methods reveal great potential for the quantitative confirmation of subjectively derived
categories in published reviews as well as for exploring the research landscape and identifying the
categories. We proposed guidelines for conducting the science mapping of management and orga-
nization research streams.
Several new bibliometric methods are likely to become prominent in the future. Hybrid methods
combining the existing bibliometric and semantic approaches (e.g., bibliographic coupling with latent
semantic indexing) could be used to detect new emerging topics in scientific research (Glänzel &
Thijs, 2012) and are rapidly becoming the preferred basis of the mapping and visualization of science
(Thijs, Schiebel, & Glänzel, 2013). Connecting documents through a combination of bibliometric and
second-order textual similarities can improve the accuracy of document clustering. Second-order
similarities take the lexical content into account and can overcome problems of simple co-word
methods like synonyms and spelling variances (e.g., British vs. American spelling of words).
Topic modeling (Blei, 2012) is a family of content analysis methods that originates from machine
learning. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is the most widely used topic modeling method that is
able to decipher the topical structure of a large corpus of unstructured documents. It assigns the prob-
ability of topics to documents and determines which words are connected to particular topics. Topic
modeling could be applied to document abstracts and full texts, which can be later connected based
on their thematic similarity. These methods hold great potential for expanding the scope of mapping
the management and organization domain. Management scholars can capitalize on these advances in
two ways: They may wait for suitable software to be developed or collaborate with information
scientists on the forefront of advancing bibliometric research.
We think that science mapping with bibliometric methods is useful in two main ways: (a) to help
researchers new to a field quickly grasp the field’s structure and (b) to introduce quantitative rigor
into traditional literature reviews. We envision that in the future bibliometric methods will become
the third major approach (in addition to traditional qualitative literature reviews and meta-analyses)
458 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

used for reviewing scientific literature. However, new doctoral students need to be trained in the
technique. Some doctoral programs already provide this, but further proliferation of this practice
is called for. This paper represents our effort to promote these methods and provide a thorough intro-
duction to bibliometric methods for researchers unfamiliar with them.
We are aware that other bibliometric studies have been published in journals not listed by the
SSCI or are simply unpublished. However, we included the highest quality journals, so our synth-
esis represents the state of the art of bibliometric research in management and organization. One
trend is obvious. The bar for publishing bibliometric studies is being raised higher. Bibliometric
methods are transforming from being novel methods interesting in their own right to a tool used for
a specific purpose: namely, to increase the rigor and structuring of literature reviews. Researchers
applying bibliometric methods need to choose their research questions much more carefully and
perform the research rigorously.
Finally, bibliometric methods are no substitute for extensive reading and synthesis. Bibliometrics
can reliably connect publications, authors, or journals; identify research substreams; and produce
maps of published research, but it is up to the researcher and their knowledge of the field to interpret
the findings—which is the hard part.

APPENDIX A
Study Selection and Coding
Falling within the scope of this article are studies using bibliometric methods for mapping research
fields or research topics in management and organization. Using Web of Science (WOS), a search
query was made for the following terms: bibliometric* OR co-citation OR bibliographic coupling
OR co-author OR co-word in the topic of the entry. The search returned 5,046 entries, which were
further filtered for publications in the management and business domain. We then read every
abstract of the remaining 381 documents. We excluded those unrelated to the scope of our research.
Documents in this phase were mainly excluded for the following reasons:

 Studies conducted science mapping in fields unrelated to management or organization (e.g.

nanotechnology).
 A large number of documents were excluded because their main topic was measuring the
productivity of researchers, organizations, or systems/countries, which is outside the scope
of our research. This research stream is more concerned with measuring the productivity
of scientists and a comparison/ranking of various journals, research organizations, or coun-
tries than with mapping the science.
 Studies examined patents, not scientific publications; as such, they belonged to the domain of
technological forecasting.
 The keyword ‘‘co-author’’ in a number of articles referred just to a co-author without any con-
nection to the bibliometric method of co-author analysis.

After filtering the publications through the WOS online user interface, we downloaded the doc-
uments left in the set. Where articles were unavailable through our resources, we contacted the
authors for the original manuscript. We were unable to retrieve three articles even after this step.
Finally, we were left with 81 studies that constitute the publications in our data sample.
Once the list of publications had been compiled, all the manuscripts were carefully read and
coded by one of the authors and a research assistant. Agreement ranged between 87.7% and
100%. The differences were reconciled in a joint session where manuscripts in question were ana-
lyzed and solutions determined. The categories were determined by the two authors to cover the
Zupic and Čater 459

main aspects of the bibliometric analysis. Coders categorized the following: (a) which biblio-
metric methods were utilized, (b) whether the study used multiple time periods to track the evolu-
tion of the field through time, (c) how the selection was performed, (d) which database was used as
source of bibliometric data, (e) which bibliometric software was used, (f) what was the unit of
analysis, (g) which methods were applied to produce subgroups, (h) which visualization method
was used, and (i) which visualization software was employed.

Selected Studies
Authors Year Publication Name Title

Pilkington and Lawton 2013 Long Range Planning Divided by a Common Language?
Transnational Insights Into Epistemological
and Methodological Approaches to
Strategic Management Research in English-
Speaking Countries
Walter and Ribiere 2013 Knowledge Management A Citation and Co-Citation Analysis of
Research and Practice 10 Years of KM Theory and Practices
Vogel and Güttel 2013 International Journal of The Dynamic Capability View in Strategic
Management Reviews Management: A Bibliometric Review
Chabowski, Samiee, and Hult 2013 Journal of International A Bibliometric Analysis of the Global
Business Studies Branding Literature and a Research
Agenda
Muñoz-Leiva, Sánchez-Fernán- 2013 The Service Industries Detecting Salient Themes in Financial
dez, Liébana-Cabanillas, and Journal Marketing Research From 1961 to 2010
Martı́nez-Fiestas
Coombes and Nicholson 2013 Industrial Marketing Business Models and Their Relationship With
Management Marketing: A Systematic Literature Review
Carvalho, Fleury, and Lopes 2013 Technological Forecasting An Overview of the Literature on
and Social Change Technology Roadmapping (TRM):
Contributions and Trends
Raasch, Lee, Spaeth, and 2013 Research Policy The Rise and Fall of Interdisciplinary
Herstatt Research: The Case of Open Source
Innovation
Gerdsri, Kongthon, and 2013 Technology Analysis and Mapping the Knowledge Evolution and
Vatananan Strategic Management Professional Network in the Field of
Technology Roadmapping: A Bibliometric
Analysis
Ferreira, Pinto, Serra, and 2013 Review of Business A Bibliometric Study of John Dunning’s
Santos Management Contribution to International Business
Research
Bernroider, Pilkington, and 2013 Journal of Information Research in Information Systems: A Study of
Córdoba Technology Diversity and Inter-Disciplinary Discourse
in the AIS Basket Journals Between 1995
and 2011
Gundolf and Filser 2013 Journal of Business Ethics Management Research and Religion:
A Citation Analysis
Benavides-Velasco, Quintana- 2013 Small Business Economics Trends in Family Business Research
Garcı́a, and Guzmán-Parra
Shafique 2013 Strategic Management Thinking Inside the Box—Intellectual
Journal Structure of the Knowledge Base of
Innovation Research (1988-2008)
Ma, Liang, Yu, and Lee 2012 Business Ethics: A Most Cited Business Ethics Publications:
European Review Mapping the Intellectual Structure of
(continued)
460 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

Selected Studies (continued)

Authors Year Publication Name Title

Business Ethics Studies in 2001-2008

Wallin 2012 Innovation: Management, The Bibliometric Structure of Spin-Off
Policy and Practice Literature
Leone, Robinson, Bragge, and 2012 Journal of Business A Citation and Profiling Analysis of Pricing
Somervuori Research Research From 1980 to 2010
Di Guardo and Harrigan 2012 Journal of Technology Mapping Research on Strategic Alliances and
Transfer Innovation: A Co-Citation Analysis
Vogel 2012 Organization Studies The Visible Colleges of Management and
Organization Studies: A Bibliometric
Analysis of Academic Journals
Di Stefano, Gambardella, and 2012 Research Policy Technology Push and Demand Pull
Verona Perspectives in Innovation Studies:
Current Findings and Future Research
Directions
Nosella, Cantarello, and 2012 Strategic Organization The Intellectual Structure of Organizational
Filippini Ambidexterity: A Bibliographic
Investigation Into the State of the Art
Keupp, Palmié, and Gassmann 2012 International Journal of The Strategic Management of Innovation:
Management Reviews A Systematic Review and Paths for Future
Research
Fagerberg, Fosaas and 2012 Research Policy Innovation: Exploring the Knowledge Base
Sapprasert
Martin, Nightingale, and 2012 Research Policy Science and Technology Studies: Exploring
Yegros-Yegros the Knowledge Base
Martin 2012 Research Policy The Evolution of Science Policy and
Innovation Studies
Bhupatiraju, Nomaler, Triulzi 2012 Research Policy Knowledge Flows—Analyzing the Core
and Verspagen Literature of Innovation, Entrepreneurship
and Science and Technology Studies
Landström, Harirchi and 2012 Research Policy Entrepreneurship: Exploring the Knowledge
Åström Base
Hanisch and Wald 2012 Project Management A Bibliometric View on the Use of
Journal Contingency Theory in Project
Management Research
Samiee and Chabowski 2012 Journal of the Academy of Knowledge Structure in International
Marketing Science Marketing: A Multi-Method Bibliometric
Analysis
Ronda-Pupo and Guerras- 2012 Strategic Management Dynamics of the Evolution of the Strategy
Martin Journal Concept 1962-2008: A Co-Word Analysis
Montiel Campos, Sole Parella, 2012 Rbgn-Revista Brasileira de Mapping the Intellectual Structure of
and Palma Gestao de Negocio Entrepreneurship Research: Revisiting the
Invisible College
Calabretta, Durisin, and 2011 Journal of Business Ethics Uncovering the Intellectual Structure of
Ogliengo Research in Business Ethics: A Journey
Through the History, the Classics, and the
Pillars of Journal of Business Ethics
Tu 2011 African Journal of Business A Study of Influential Authors, Works and
Management Research Network of Consumer Behavior
Research
Shilbury 2011 Journal of Sport A Bibliometric Study of Citations to Sport
Management Management and Marketing Journals
Chabowski, Hult, and Mena 2011 Journal of Retailing The Retailing Literature as a Basis for
Franchising Research: Using Intellectual
(continued)
Zupic and Čater 461

Selected Studies (continued)

Authors Year Publication Name Title

Structure to Advance Theory

Backhaus, Luegger, and Koch 2011 Industrial Marketing The Structure and Evolution of Business-to-
Management Business Marketing: A Citation and Co-
Citation Analysis
Herbst, Voeth, and Meister 2011 Industrial Marketing What Do We Know About Buyer-Seller
Management Negotiations in Marketing Research?
A Status Quo Analysis
Kraus 2011 African Journal of Business State-of-the-Art Current Research in Inter-
Management national Entrepreneurship: A Citation
Analysis
Fischbach, Putzke, and 2011 Electronic Markets Co-Authorship Networks in Electronic
Schoder Markets Research
Chabowski, Mena, and 2011 Journal of the Academy of The Structure of Sustainability Research in
Gonzalez-Padron Marketing Science Marketing, 1958-2008: A Basis for Future
Research Opportunities
Huang and Ho 2011 African Journal of Business Historical Research on Corporate
Management Governance: A Bibliometric Analysis
Galvagno 2011 European Journal of The Intellectual Structure of the Anti-
Marketing Consumption and Consumer Resistance
Field: An Author Co-Citation Analysis
Marsilio, Cappellaro, and 2011 Public Management The Intellectual Structure of Research Into
Cuccurullo Review PPPS: A Bibliometric Analysis
Chang and Ho 2010 African Journal of Business Bibliometric Analysis of Financial Crisis
Management Research
Raghuram, Tuertscher, and 2010 Information Systems Mapping the Field of Virtual Work:
Garud Research A Co-Citation Analysis
Di Stefano, Verano, and 2010 Industrial and Corporate Dynamic Capabilities Deconstructed:
Peteraf Change A Bibliographic Investigation Into the
Origins, Development, and Future
Directions of the Research Domain
Baumgartner 2010 Journal of Consumer Bibliometric Reflections on the History of
Psychology Consumer Research
Volberda, Foss, and Lyles 2010 Organization Science Absorbing the Concept of Absorptive
Capacity: How to Realize Its Potential in
the Organization Field
Durisin, Calabretta, and 2010 Journal of Product The Intellectual Structure of Product
Parmeggiani Innovation Innovation Research: A Bibliometric Study
Management of the Journal of Product Innovation
Management, 1984-2004
Uysal 2010 Journal of Business Ethics Business Ethics Research With an Accounting
Focus: A Bibliometric Analysis From 1988
to 2007
Ma and Yu 2010 Journal of Knowledge Research Paradigms of Contemporary
Management Knowledge Management Studies:
1998-2007
Ma 2009 Journal of Business Ethics The Status of Contemporary Business Ethics
Research: Present and Future
Pilkington and Meredith 2009 Journal of Operations The Evolution of the Intellectual Structure of
Management Operations Management—1980-2006:
A Citation/Co-Citation Analysis
Uslay, Morgan, and Sheth 2009 Journal of the Academy of Peter Drucker on Marketing: An Exploration
Marketing Science of Five Tenets
2009
(continued)
462 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

Selected Studies (continued)

Authors Year Publication Name Title

Artto, Martinsuo, International Journal of Foundations of Program Management:

Gemuendne, and Murtoaro Project Management A Bibliometric View
Kim and McMillan 2008 Journal of Advertising Evaluation of Internet Advertising
Research—A Bibliometric Analysis of
Citations From Key Sources
Nerur, Rasheed, and 2008 Strategic Management The Intellectual Structure of the Strategic
Natarajan Journal Management Field: An Author Co-Citation
Analysis
Ma, Lee, and Yu 2008 International Journal of Ten Years of Conflict Management Studies:
Conflict Management Themes, Concepts and Relationships
Pilkington and Chai 2008 International Journal of Research Themes, Concepts and
Service Industry Relationships—A Study of International
Management Journal of Service Industry Management
(1990-2005)
Charvet, Cooper, and 2008 Journal of Business The Intellectual Structure of Supply Chain
Gardner Logistics Management: A Bibliometric Approach
McMillan 2008 R & D Management Mapping the Invisible Colleges of R&D
Management
Casillas and Acedo 2007 Family Business Review Evolution of the Intellectual Structure of
Family Business Literature: A Bibliometric
Study of FBR
Biemans, Griffin, and 2007 Journal of Product Twenty Years of the Journal of Product
Moenaert Innovation Innovation Management: History,
Management Participants, and Knowledge Stock and
Flows
Acedo, Barroso, Casanueva, 2006 Journal of Management Co-Authorship in Management and
and Galan Studies Organizational Studies: An Empirical
and Network Analysis
Acedo, Barroso, and Galan 2006 Strategic Management The Resource-Based Theory: Dissemination
Journal and Main Trends
Gregoire, Noel, Dery, and 2006 Entrepreneurship Theory Is There Conceptual Convergence in
Bechard and Practice Entrepreneurship Research? A Co-
Citation Analysis of Frontiers of Entre-
preneurship Research, 1981-2004
Cornelius, Landstrom, and 2006 Entrepreneurship Theory Entrepreneurial Studies: The Dynamic
Persson and Practice Research Front of a Developing Social
Science
Schildt, Zahra, and Sillanpaa 2006 Entrepreneurship Theory Scholarly Communities in Entrepreneurship
and Practice Research: A Co-Citation Analysis
Reader and Watkins 2006 Entrepreneurship Theory The Social and Collaborative Nature of
and Practice Entrepreneurship Scholarship: A Co-
Citation and Perceptual Analysis
Pilkington and Teichert 2006 Technovation Management of Technology: Themes,
Concepts and Relationships
Cornelius and Persson 2006 Technovation Who’s Who in Venture Capital Research
Pilkington and Fitzgerald 2006 International Journal of Operations Management Themes, Concepts
Operations and and Relationships: A Forward
Production Retrospective of IJOPM
Management
Acedo and Casillas 2005 International Business Current Paradigms in the International
Review Management Field: An Author Co-Citation
Analysis
(continued)
Zupic and Čater 463

Selected Studies (continued)

Authors Year Publication Name Title

Neely 2005 International Journal of The Evolution of Performance Measurement

Operations and Research—Developments in the Last
Production Decade and a Research Agenda for the
Management Next
Meyer, Pereira, Persson, and 2004 Research Policy The Scientometric World of Keith Pavitt—A
Granstrand Tribute to His Contributions to Research
Policy and Patent Analysis
Ramos-Rodriguez and Ruiz- 2004 Strategic Management Changes in the Intellectual Structure of
Navarro Journal Strategic Management Research: A
Bibliometric Study of the Strategic
Management Journal, 1980-2000
Phillips, Baumgartner, and 1999 Advances in Consumer Influence in the Evolving Citation Network of
Pieters Research, Vol. 26 the Journal of Consumer Research
Pilkington and Liston-Heyes 1999 International Journal of Is Production and Operations Management a
Operations and Discipline? A Citation/Co-Citation Study
Production
Management
Pasadeos, Phelps, and Kim 1998 Journal of Advertising Disciplinary Impact of Advertising Scholars:
Temporal Comparisons of Influential
Authors, Works and Research Networks
Usdiken and Pasadeos 1995 Organization Studies Organizational Analysis in North-America
and Europe—A Comparison of
Co-Citation Networks
Hoffman and Holbrook 1993 Journal of Consumer The Intellectual Structure of Consumer
Research Research—A Bibliometric Study of Author
Co-Citations in the 1st 15 Years of the
Journal of Consumer Research

APPENDIX B
Exact Steps to Reproduce a Bibliometric Analysis of the ORM Journal
1. Select and download data from the Web of Science website
a. Go to WOS website apps.webofknowledge.com (subscription needed, often included in
university library access)
b. Select ‘‘Web of Science Core Collection’’ (this step is needed to be able to export cited
references)
c. Search for ‘‘Organizational Research Methods’’ in Publication Name
d. Exclude publication year 1998 (since the years 1999 and 2000 are missing from Web of
Science records we will perform the analysis on papers published since 2001)—465
records are left
e. Export bibliometric data—Select ‘‘Save to Other File Formats’’
f. Choose record numbers from 1 to 465 (the WOS interface enables the export of up to 500
records. If the search returns more than 500 records, each batch of 500 has to be exported
separately: 1-500, 501-1000, etc. Files can be later combined in WordPad or another text
processor.)
g. Choose Record Content: ‘‘Full Record and Cited References’’
h. Choose File Format: ‘‘Plain Text’’
i. Click Send and save to file ‘‘orm.txt’’
464 Organizational Research Methods 18(3)

2. Perform bibliometric analysis in BibExcel

a. Open the file ‘‘orm.txt’’ in the BibExcel software
b. File preprocessing (these steps are outlined in the BibExcel PowerPoint tutorial ‘‘Map-
ping Science Using Bibexcel and Pajek’’)
i. Replace line feeds with the carriage return—BibExcel->Edit doc-file->Replace line
feed with carriage return
ii. Convert to the Dialog format—BibExcel-> Misc->Convert to Dialog format->Con-
vert from Web of Science
iii. Process the cited references data into an intermediate .out file for co-citation anal-
ysis– Select ‘‘Any; separated field’’ as the field to be analyzed, put ‘‘CD’’ into the
Old tag field. Press the ‘‘Prep’’ button.
iv. Process the author names to keep only the first initial BibExcel->Edit out-file-
>Keep only author’s first initial
v. Process the cited references—BibExcel->Edit out-file->Convert Upper Lower
Case->Good for Cited reference strings
c. Perform citation analysis for journals, first authors, and documents
i. Get the top cited journals—BibExcel->Select type of unit ‘‘Cited journal’’; Check the
‘‘Sort descending’’ option; press the Start button.
ii. Save the file with the top cited journals—rename the ‘‘orm.cit’’ file ‘‘orm-
journal.cit’’.
iii. Clean the data for the top cited journals—add citation counts for journals that are
represented with several different strings
iv. Get the top cited documents—BibExcel->Select type of unit ‘‘Whole string’’; press
the Start button.
v. Save the file with the top cited documents—rename the ‘‘orm.cit’’ file ‘‘orm-
document.cit’’.
vi. Clean the data for the top cited documents—add citation counts for documents that
are represented with several different strings.
d. Perform co-citation analysis with document as the unit of analysis.
i. Establish the citation threshold on which to perform the co-citation analysis. We
decided to establish the cutoff point at nine citations, meaning we are doing
co-citation analysis on the top 112 cited documents.
ii. Double-click on the orm.cit file; keep only the first 112 entries in the window ‘‘The
List’’.
iii. Initiate co-citation frequency counts—first click on the orm.low file, then BibEx-
cel->Analyze->Co-occurrence->Make pairs via listbox (first No, then OK).
iv. Produce a square co-citation frequency matrix that can be later analyzed with PCA—
Keep only the first 112 entries in the window ‘‘The List’’; click on the orm.coc file;
BibExcel->Analyze->Make a matrix for MDS, etc.
v. Open the square matrix ‘‘orm.ma2’’ file in Microsoft Excel, transpose the column
headers to row labels (first column), save as ‘‘orm.csv’’.
vi. Export the co-citation network in the Pajek format, this can be later imported into any
network analysis software—select the ‘‘orm.coc’’ file and choose BibExcel->Map-
ping->Create net-file for Pajek.
3. Find subgroups and visualize the network in Pajek.
a. Open file ‘‘orm.net’’ in Pajek—Pajek->Networks->Read network
b. Implement Louvain algorithm to find subgroups—Pajek->Create Partition->Commu-
nities->Louvain Method->Multilevel Coarsening þ Single Refinement (Resolution
parameter ¼ 1.5)
Zupic and Čater 465

c. Extract each subgroup into separate network—Pajek->Operations->NetworkþPartition-

>Extract Subnetwork
d. Draw each subgroup as separate network—Pajek->Draw->Network
e. Use Kamada-Kawai algorithm for network visualization—Pajek(drawing)->Layout-
>Energy->Kamada-Kawai->Free

Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Matej Černe, Saša Batistič, Darija Aleksič, and Robert Kaše for valuable comments
on previous versions of this manuscript. The editorial guidance of James M. LeBreton and helpful comments
from two anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged. Errors remain our own.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Author Biographies
Ivan Zupic is a PhD candidate in Management and Organization at the Faculty of Economics, University of
Ljubljana, Slovenia. His PhD thesis investigates strategic configurations of high-growth firms. Before entering
academia, he worked as a consultant in IT industry and journalist/photographer in media.
Tomaž Čater is a full professor of Management at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His
research interests include competitive advantages, corporate and business strategies, and environmental strategies. His
work has been published in several international journals, including Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of
Business Economics and Management, and Personnel Review.