İşletme Tarihi Üzerine Bibliyometrik Bir Çalışma 1991'den 2023'e Web of Science'daki Yayınların İncelenmesi
A Bibliometric Study on Business History: Review of Publications in Web of Science from 1991 to 2023

Summary/Abstract: Business history research is needed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the development and dynamics of businesses over time. The aim of this research is to reveal the changes in business history using the bibliometric analysis method. Thus, while providing information about past and current situations, various predictions about the future are also presented. For this purpose, it is aimed to make inferences about the relevant literature through bibliometric analysis of public data of publications in the field of business history indexed in Web of Science (WoS). Due to their nature, bibliometric studies may produce different results in each period, even if they are carried out in the same field. Therefore, the data set prepared for the current period includes 1516 publications published between 1991-2023. Studies on the subject obtained from the WoS database were analyzed through the Biblioshiny program with R source code. Biblioshiny was preferred due to the fact that it is a publicly available program and the ease it provides in visualizing the relevant analysis outputs. In addition, content analysis, which was considered relatively difficult to perform on scientific studies in previous periods, can also be performed through this program. Content analyzes make it possible to get an idea about the essence of the facts, making bibliometric studies more than just a counting and listing task. After the data was obtained in accordance with various search criteria (language, publication type, field), manual control was carried out by the researchers. Manual control enabled the detection and elimination of studies that appeared to be related to the subject at the first search but had different fields. The outputs of the analyzes performed after compiling and sorting the data set are discussed in two parts. In the initial part of the findings, information about the authors of the works in the data set, their institutions, the journals in which they were published, their countries of origin, their subjects, and their relationships with each other were shared. As a result of bibliometric analysis, it was seen that the studies came mainly from the USA, England, and Australia. It has been observed that Harvard University leads among the institutions, but Scandinavian universities such as Copenhagen and Uppsala are also in the top twenty-five in terms of productivity. It has been found that British and American universities mostly cooperate with each other, and then mostly with European, Canadian, and Chinese universities. When the articles were examined in terms of their impact, it was seen that the academic journals with the highest impact level were Journal of Business Ethics, Business History, and Harvard Business Review. It has been determined that the authors acted pragmatically in choosing their topics, and that their topics focused on performance-related issues such as growth, capacity, impact and strategy, in addition to the historical context and even more dominantly in some periods. According to criteria such as the number of citations and publications received, it has been observed that the most influential authors in the field are Jones G., Maclean M., and Augier M. In the following sections content analyzes performed with the data set are included. Content analysis consists of word tree, word cloud, thematic evolution analysis, co-occurrence network, trending topics, and thematic mapping. There are two basic approaches to whether initial search terms should be used in these analyses. According to the first approach, these terms are to be removed from the data set because they will be predominantly included in the data set and will drag the results in a certain direction. According to the second approach, basic research results should remain in the data set in order to clearly reveal their relationship with other concepts. In this research, the latter one was adopted. The findings of the research indicate that the themes change periodically, but in recent years there has been a trend towards entrepreneurship, management, and growth. It is expected that the concepts of "social responsibility", "governance" and "socio-emotional wealth" will rise in the coming periods. Finally, it was observed that approximately 80 publications were produced annually. Considering that business history is a developing field of science both in Türkiye and abroad, it is possible that the mapping activity carried out on this field, which is expected to be studied further (development direction of the field, changing concepts, active actors, etc.), will contribute to researchers in the future.

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