Entrepreneurship in family firms: an updated bibliometric overview

Abstract

Research on entrepreneurship in family firms has grown exponentially over the past two decades. Due to the various theoretical perspectives and contexts found here however, this body of research remains fragmented, with a unified understanding of the current state of knowledge and the opportunities for future research in the field continuing to lack. In this study, we address this gap by conducting an updated bibliometric analysis of the research on entrepreneurship in family firms. Here we integrate two different bibliometric methods to provide a more comprehensive picture of the field, unveiling its intellectual foundations and current research discourses and how these two are related. To do this, we first conduct a co-citation analysis clustering the intellectual foundations of the research on entrepreneurship in family firms. Second, a bibliographic coupling of recent publications from 2010 to 2021 provides a transparent structure of current research discourses.