Thirty Years of Research on Succession in the Field of Family Business: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Bibliometric analysis is the application of statistical methods to quantitatively analyze scientific publications. It makes it possible to evaluate the production of a laboratory, a journal or a field of research. The objective of this study is to carry out an analysis of the scientific literature published on succession in the field of family business over the last thirty years. Two different types of indicators were used. The first concerns the activity indicators, which provides information about the productivity of journals and authors. The second is about co-citation analysis which gives an idea of the links between researchers, and co-word analysis which identifies interactions and relationships between different research topics. The results obtained reveal that it is a relatively recent area of research with strong connections between authors. Gaps in the literature as well as future research directions are also presented.