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Entrepreneurship research in three regions-the USA, Europe and China

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Abstract

During the last few decades the field of entrepreneurship has received increased scholarly attention all over the world. Nevertheless, against this internationalization background, little is known about how entrepreneurship research developed in different regions. In this study, we illustrate the development of entrepreneurship field not only in the USA and Europe but also in China. The study is based on co-citation analysis of entrepreneurship-related articles in the SSCI and Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI) databases. It appears that the development of entrepreneurship as a research field in China has followed a different path compared to the USA and Europe, where “contextual force” was the main driver in the early stage, but during the development process the external influence became weaker and that of “internal force” becomes stronger. In China, the main driver of entrepreneurship research is “internal force” while the “contextual force” has been downplayed. Similarities and differences in the development process across regions have also been identified.

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Notes

  1. “创业” covers the meaning of “entrepreneur (s)”, “entrepreneurial” and “entrepreneurship”.

  2. Articles and reviews are most standardized document types. Books are very important intermediary for knowledge diffusion, especially for a young field like entrepreneurship. Conference proceedings and meeting abstracts can represent research front in one field. Thus all above mentioned document types were included. The accuracy of the data was guaranteed by manual cleaning of all data.

  3. The authors are aware that there are other approaches to measure similarity between documents (e.g. Pearson correlation coefficient, Salton Index, Jaccard Index, etc.). In this study, raw co-citation frequency was adopted in that this method has been used frequently in previous research and the map generated well represented reality in this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business Administration, Shanghai University of Finance, Shanghai, China

    Su Jing

  2. Institute for Innovation and Strategic Studies, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Zhai Qinghua

  3. Sten K Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Su Jing, Zhai Qinghua & Hans Landström

  4. School of Economic and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Su Jing & Zhai Qinghua

  5. Shanghai, Yangpu District, China, 200092

    Su Jing & Zhai Qinghua

  6. PO Box 7080, S-220 07, Lund, Sweden

    Hans Landström

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  1. Su Jing
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  2. Zhai Qinghua
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Correspondence to Zhai Qinghua.

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Jing, S., Qinghua, Z. & Landström, H. Entrepreneurship research in three regions-the USA, Europe and China. Int Entrep Manag J 11, 861–890 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-014-0315-6

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