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Building the genealogy of family business internationalization: a bibliometric mixed-method approach

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Abstract

The paper aims to build the genealogy of the literature on Internationalization of Family Business (IFB) identifying the ‘fathers’ (the most important papers in the field), ‘ancestors’ (those on which the fathers have been built on), and ‘descendants’ (the most recent publications and topics) of the research field. Results originate from a complete database on which we used a bibliometric mixed-method approach by sequentially employing citation analysis, co-citation analysis, and bibliographic coupling. Our analysis enriches the academic debate on IFB with more understanding of the field’s knowledge structure (origins, theoretical roots, and developments), meanwhile proposing a sequential use of different bibliometric methods and providing a methodological contribution.

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Notes

  1. The year of foundation of Family Business Review.

  2. The complete list of 141 papers is provided upon request.

  3. The clusters are labeled according to the following process: through separate reading of the papers in each cluster, authors independently determined labels, then worked toward an agreement on each given label.

  4. However, it has to be specified that all five bridges refer to family SMEs, and research on family SMEs usually focuses on lack on managerial capabilities.

  5. Since the fathers published in the Nineties are only three, we decided to incorporate them within the first-time window, which is therefore from 1991 to 2005.

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Galvagno, M., Pisano, V. Building the genealogy of family business internationalization: a bibliometric mixed-method approach. Scientometrics 126, 757–783 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03755-4

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