bibliometric

Due to the speed and uncertainty of environmental changes, firms become less confident in the effectiveness of planning that is based on previous experience and assumptions. Instead, executives started to recognize that business decisions should not only be driven by past data, but also be based on systematic evaluation of possible forthcoming trends by constantly scanning for and interpreting discontinuities in the external environment. Corporate foresight can be defined as the desire of the company to understand futures for the long-term interests of the company. This article was written with the aim of a systematic review of corporate foresight literature between 2006 and 2022. The systematic review of corporate foresight literature includes the scientific research works of countries, the distribution of articles based on the year of publication, journals, authors, the number of citations to the journals and researchers and classified from the prospective of methodology. The findings show that the subject of corporate foresight has received more attention over time, and researchers can use different theoretical and methodological approaches to investigate corporate foresight and cover the research gap.

Over the past decade, the literature on value creation has experienced significant growth in relation to the hospitality industry. This growth is attributed to the increasing importance of value creation issues for stakeholders involved in hospitality activities, which are crucial for securing benefits and advancing operations. The relationship between value creation and stakeholder theory has been examined in the literature; however, there is a lack of comprehensive and foundational studies on this topic. To address this research gap, this paper conducts a bibliometric analysis of the literature, simultaneously examining research and scholarly texts related to value creation and stakeholder theory within the hospitality sector. After formulating a search strategy and applying filters to organize and manage documents, a total of 6,690 documents published in the Web of Science database from 2005 to 2024 were analyzed using co-authorship, co-occurrence, keyword, direct citation, and co-citation analyses. Additionally, VOSviewer software was used for data visualization, cluster mapping, and demonstrating the diverse relationships within the literature. The results of this paper identified trends in the rise and fall of the literature, key articles, authors, journals, institutions, and countries focusing on value creation based on stakeholder theory. Co-occurrence of keywords revealed that "value creation,""innovation,""co-creation of value,""business model,""intellectual capital," "social entrepreneurship," "business model innovation,""sustainability," "entrepreneurship," "service logic," "value," "corporate social responsibility,""open innovation," "co-creation,""value capture,""knowledge management,""business models,""customer value," "strategy," "resource-based view," "performance," "dynamic capabilities," "social capital," "competitive advantage," "digital transformation,""firm performance,""digitization,""ecosystems,""value allocation," and "co-opetition" were common keywords related to the research topic.

Despite the growing interest in business divestiture, there is a lack of illustrating framework for divestiture research. The purpose of this research is to present a macro picture and provide valuable insight into the position and trend of research in this field to be helpful for future research. In this research, the bibliometric method was used, which identifies the trends and thoughts of thinkers in this field. The most important authors and journals between 1994 and 2023 have been identified. Ms. Feldman is the most active and influential author in this field, and the Journal of Strategic Management has the most published articles with 28 frequencies. The words performance, diversification, governance, and sale assets are the keywords that have been repeated the most. Based on the results of the histogram mapping, three research paths have been identified, in the first area, the effect of strategies such as acquisition and diversification as a stimulus has been examined, the second area deals with the effect of corporate governance, and the third area examines the consequences of divestment.

This research is a part of qualitative and quantitative research in terms of practical purpose and terms of method. The analyses of the bibliometric section are related to the qualitative section and the neural network analyses are related to the quantitative section. The method of systematic bibliometric review was carried out with VOSviewer software and R programming language. Three main clusters were identified in the vocabulary co-occurrence analysis section, which include: (1) innovation in event tourism attractions (2) mental engagement towards event tourism destination attachment (3) event tourism experiences in social media. In the quantitative section, following the results of the TCM-ADO framework, neural network analyses were performed on the clusters to predict event tourism revisit intention. The results indicate that the variables of social media, experience, and tourist attractions, satisfaction, loyalty, attitudes, mental involvement and dependence on the place effect revisiting.

Business exit strategies are fundamental to ensuring a company's long-term viability. Despite their critical role, this area of research has been surprisingly understudied. This knowledge gap can leave companies unprepared to navigate the complexities of exiting a market or business venture. To bridge this critical knowledge gap, our study conducts a systematic literature review, analyzing research findings from the past three decades (1990-2022). By synthesizing key findings, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of current research trends in business exit strategies. This analysis will not only offer valuable insights into existing knowledge but also identify potential gaps and opportunities for future exploration. By understanding the research landscape, we can pave the way for more informed decision-making and successful business exit strategies.
 

We employed a combined approach of systematic literature review and bibliometrics using R programming to analyze trends in business exit research.
 

A co-occurrence network analysis revealed three main thematic clusters in business exit research i.e., performance, asset sales, and survival. These clusters, representing the most frequently co-occurring keywords within the field, exhibit the highest cumulative growth over the past three decades. This highlights their thematic significance in exit strategy research. For instance, "performance" frequently co-occurs with concepts like acquisition, governance, diversification, and decision-making, suggesting its central role in exit decisions. Similarly, a review of co-citations identified management publications as the most interconnected followed by financial management and economics publications. This suggests a disciplinary gap within the research area. Four key research themes emerged from the analysis were exit drivers, exit decisions, exit modes, and consequences. Additionally, several theoretical perspectives emerged, including agency theory, corporate governance, resource-based view, and dynamic capability theory.
 

The research landscape is dominated by studies on exit drivers and exit consequences, often explained through frameworks such as agency theory, transaction cost economics (TCE), resource-based view (RBV), and evolutionary theory. Financial research focuses on the exit's impact on subsidiary performance and parent company financials, while economics explores industry factors influencing exit decisions. Financial researchers primarily investigate the exit's impact on subsidiary performance and the parent company's post-exit financial health. Agency theory is the dominant theoretical framework in this area. Economists examine how micro and macroeconomic factors (industry concentration, growth, size, profitability), economies of scale, capital intensity, and sunk costs influence barriers to entry and exit, ultimately driving business exits. Based on these findings, future research avenues include investigating the role of diversification as a driver of business exits, exploring how corporate governance structures influence both firm performance and exit decisions, analyzing factors contributing to non-optimal timing of business exits, examining the potential for reusing resources in new ventures to facilitate exits and minimize negative consequences, investigating the role of organizational capabilities in early detection of exit signals, and conducting a comprehensive exploration of both internal and external consequences of business exits, along with effective response strategies.

In today's world, making strategic decisions to combat security threats is extremely vital, as the pace of scientific advancement is dramatically increasing and there is no room for delay or inefficiency. Analyzing scientific documents, including inventions, articles, provides us with valuable insights into the development of science and technology. Furthermore, these resources reveal more valuable perspectives on the interconnectedness within scientific networks of individuals, organizations, and countries, which are the foundation of contemporary scientific endeavors. Chemical warfare agents, due to their high potential for individual and societal devastating effects, are one of the major security threats to our country. Their clandestine production, easy dissemination, and destructive power make them an attractive tool for terrorist entities and hostile nations intending to create chaos and undermine the social stability of the country. In this study, we have investigated the scientometric analysis of openly published resources such as documents, articles, and patented inventions published in Web of Science and Lens databases in the past 10 years in the field of chemical warfare agents with the aim of identifying advances, developments, and various scientific challenges in this area. We have also utilized scientometric studies and visualization using VOS Viewer software to investigate and introduce keywords, emerging and growing topics, networks of elites and researchers, cooperation networks among the most important countries, companies, organizations, scientific and research centers in the past decade in the field of chemical warfare agents.

These days, startups have attracted a lot of attention at the national and international level because countries need innovation in their businesses to create a dynamic in the economy, startups or businesses can grow and improve. Startups are usually created from big ideas and evolve to achieve success, but startups face many obstacles to success. One of the obstacles that start-ups and new businesses face is choosing a partner at each stage of the business life cycle, so doing this process is not an easy task and in this regard aspects and criteria should be considered. Identifying and analyzing the relationship between partner selection criteria can help to increase the probability of success and continue the path of startups formed in the ecosystem so that the active people in this ecosystem can make smarter decisions. One of the vital factors of partnership, sustainability and transparency are at the highest priority level and therefore more attention should be paid to these matters. To obtain a complementary, interconnected, and integrated view to examine the research topic and also to fill the existing gaps, this research seeks to do the following: The performance and scientific approach of researchers and people active in the ecosystem to express some selection criteria To be analyzed as a partner and investor in new businesses and start-ups.

Over the recent years, the concept of customer engagement has emerged as a focal point in marketing research. Despite the increasing interest in this concept, there is a lack of a comprehensive body of research in this area. Additionally, existing research in this field has focused on small segments rather than taking a holistic view of customer engagement literature. Furthermore, different theoretical perspectives have led to a fragmented theory. In light of this gap, the present study aims to delineate the evolutionary trajectory of customer engagement literature and outline the knowledge structure of the field, providing a comprehensive perspective.

The type of research in this study is qualitative in terms of data nature, applied in terms of purpose, and bibliometric in terms of data collection. The bibliometric method, as a practical application of mathematical and statistical methods, serves to identify the intellectual trajectories of scholars within a field. It also illuminates the structures and underlying framework of knowledge, highlighting their interrelationships. This approach offers an unbiased perspective for researchers. All analyses were conducted using R programming languages. The algorithms employed included thematic analysis, correspondence analysis, clustering algorithms, and co-occurrence analysis of words.

The study identified the most influential authors and journals within the period spanning 2009 to 2022. The most active and influential author in this field is Ms. Hollubeek. Additionally, the journal "Business Research" with a frequency of 41 has the highest number of published articles. The majority of publications are attributed to the United States, Australia, and China. The most frequently occurring words related to customer engagement are customer satisfaction, behavior, impact, and scale development metrics. Furthermore, the results indicate that the majority of research in the field of customer engagement focuses on social media marketing and brand loyalty. Additionally, based on co-occurrence analysis, three clusters of words related to the concepts of engagement and its metrics in social networks, preconditions for customer engagement, recommendation marketing, and the effects of social networks on customer behavior were extracted. This study also provides a comprehensive insight into marketing and brand managers by identifying the main themes of customer engagement. Moreover, the direction and trends of customer engagement shed light on a range of strategic opportunities that can be used by brand managers as a competitive advantage.

Based on the results of the histogram mapping, three main pathways of scholars in this field were elucidated. The first one focuses on the customer-centric approach for organizations. From this perspective, organizations should delegate some control to the customer and provide them with incentives, effectively making the customer the marketer of the company. The second pathway has reached its peak with the emergence of social networks and interactions between organization-customer and customer-customer. A wide range of research in the areas of brand community, engagement metrics, and engagement drivers, including content type, customer attitude, industry, and behavior, are encompassed in this pathway. The last one is service dominance. Based on this, engagement is defined as the interaction and creative experiences of the customer with the brand. This pathway is rapidly evolving from a micro to macro perspective and new research is likely to focus on all actors in a service eco-system.

The distribution system of agricultural products has the important responsibility of delivering food to households and reducing hunger around the world. In this regard, the present research was conducted based on interpretative paradigm with the aim of a systematic bibliometric review and content analysis of agricultural product distribution system studies. For this purpose, after a systematic search in the Scopus and WOS databases, 331 related articles from 1974 to 2023 were selected based on the PRISMA protocol and entered into the bibliometric package in R software and VOSviewer software. The obtained database was analyzed based on the bibliometric techniques of citation analysis, bibliometric coupling, key word co-occurrence, conceptual thematic analysis, and content analysis. The findings showed that four clusters—"symbiosis of distribution system members", "distribution system networking with external partners", "customer satisfaction with the distribution system," and "distribution system performance"—were identified from the studies. The results of this study suggest the use of a multi-network distribution system and the use of Third-Party Logistic (3PL) providers capabilities for better distribution of agricultural products.

; it seems that till now, there has been no research to present a comprehensive pattern in the field of sales management especially in the retail industry, with the qualitative method. In order to fill this gap, the present qualitative research is designed to provide a comprehensive sales force management framework in Refah chain stores in Mazandaran Province. This Research has been compiled in two sections. In the first part, by using the Bibliometric method, the important keywords were discovered and the co-occurrence map of keywords were drawn in VOSviwer Software. In the second part, because the keywords from the first step were ineffective and limmeted; researchers tried to identified the exact component of sales force management with using semi-structured interview and thematic analysis. For this purpose, the six sales manager were selected with the help of targeted sampling method. By analysing the data, 125 codes(Basic thems) and 37 sub-themes were identified and categorized in 6 main themes including: “Organizational Planning”, “ Planning of Financial Programs”, “ Social improvement of sales force”, “ Diagnosing the sales force problem”, “ Control of sales force” and “ Correction of deviatations” . at the end the framework of sales force management in Refah chain store was drawn.

This paper aims to propose a systematic view of how Circular Supply Chain Management (CSCM) captures and evolves the state-of-the-art advances in this field. Multiple analyzes have been performed with two tools of VOSviewer and open-source R-package ‘bibliometrix”. Also, a network and bibliometric analysis of the Co-Occurrence, Co-Authorship, and Co-Citation has been made on CSCM using bibliometric and scientometrics methods on the literature available on the Web of Science and Scopus databases.

Design/methodology/approach:

 Bibliometric, network structure, and descriptive analysis have been used to investigate publications on the subject of circular supply chain management. For this purpose, a systematic review has been performed using the Prisma review protocol. After defining the research objectives and questions, the relevant keywords for the sources and database and search codes have been used for an online search. Then, the initial search has been conducted. The next step involved screening the study results. 116 published articles have been selected from Scopus for analysis. The potential papers were then downloaded in CSV format for bibliometric analysis and synthesis. The final data for this research has been selected from 2010 to 2021. All the data was exported in CSV format to the Bibliometrix and Vosviewer software for data analysis. Also, Co-Authorship, word Co-Occurrence, and Co-Citation analysis have been generated using VOSviewer.

This study analyzed the annual publication trends, the most productive authors, the most cited articles, the most productive affiliations, the most important journals, the most productive countries, and keywords. Collaboration, co-occurrence, co-authors, co-citation, and historiographical analysis were also performed in this study. Findings indicated that "Perona, M" and "Mina, H" with six and five articles were the most productive authors in the development of this field. Also, Geissdoerfer's article was the most cited article with 231 citations, and it can be considered a pioneering work in the field of CSCM development. Farooq's article was also the most cited local article. Govindan et al.'s (2020) article were the most important in co-citation analysis. Great Britain and Italy were the most productive countries with 70 and 66 publications. Cambridge University was the most productive university in England. The "Journal of Cleaner Production" and "Sustainability" were the most visited journal with 24 and 8 articles. The most dominant keywords were "circular economy" and "circular supply chain". The main keywords shared in the most advanced cluster were "circular economy", "circular supply chain", and "supply chain". The main common keywords in cluster 2 included "supply chain management" and "circular supply chain management", and the main common keywords in cluster 3 included "sustainability, and “closed loop supply chain". Also, major cooperated countries included Great Britain, Italy, and China. Strong cooperation between Iran and Denmark, China and Australia, and Britain, and India was also observed. A significant number of articles were written by Iranian researchers, and the number of citations received by foreign researchers was higher. The authorship of the articles included two, one, and three authors, respectively. The results indicated the existence of the development of CSCM with quantitative modeling approaches, proficient algorithms, optimization techniques, and integrated multi-criteria decision-making techniques. Also, CSCM research must identify enablers, drivers, Critical Success Factors (CSF), obstacles and barriers, innovative frameworks, and circular business models.

Research limitations/implications:

 The papers were merely reviewed in the form of scientific and English language journal articles. Other datasets and conference papers, reports, and books can be considered for future study, but they were not included in the structural literature review.

Practical implications: 

CSCM is rapidly developing in supply chain sustainability and can operate as a guide for companies. To apply CSCM, three questions need to be answered:  i) which business/supply chain models should companies choose (closed loop or circular)?; ii) how does it cover supply chain operations to achieve a zero-waste perspective?; and iii) how does the company redesign its supply chain and implement a circular supply chain?

Social implications: 

The application of the results of this study and circular supply chain indicators have positive effects on the sustainability and circular economy.

Originality/value:

 This research is one of the early attempts to analyze the structure of social networks in CSCM using bibliometric and scientometric methods. In previous studies relevant to CSCM, mainly the structured literature review, content analysis, and integrated framework have been used, and few studies have addressed CSCM using bibliometric analysis. In this paper, the R-software was used for the first time as a tool for bibliometric data statistics (open-source R-package tool ‘Bibliometrix’ supplemented by VOS viewer, which is used for clustering and data visualization). Also, the results of the analysis of the two software were compared.

Given the importance of digital content marketing, and the scattered knowledge in the body of literature, this study seeks to take a comprehensive look at the factors influencing the digital content marketing process in order to engage the consumer with the brand on social media. With the help of the Bibliometrix package of R and VOSviewer software, the science performance and the scientific network were recognized and mapped. Classifying five main clusters in the co-citation analysis, theories, contexts, and main constructs of the field were identified. The recent trends were identified using co-occurrence analysis.  Finally, the achieved results were presented within a conceptual framework. The most common antecedents and consequences of digital content marketing were presented together with the contexts.

Bibliometric systematic review has been used to identify and analyze thematic trends in digital content marketing and brand engagement scopes. In fact, bibliometric analysis is a specific scientific field that examines the evolution of knowledge, scientific quality, and the impact of resources in this field from an objective and quantitative perspective. The bibliometric method generally has two main parts: (1) performance analysis and (2) intellectual mapping of science. In the section on performance analysis, the actions of authors, countries, and scientific institutes as well as their contribution to scientific development in a specific field are examined, while knowledge maps are used to identify the intellectual structure of the field and examine time trends and current issues in each period.

In the performance analysis, the most-cited countries, authors, and articles were identified. The United States, China, and the United Kingdom were the most outstanding countries in this field. In the co-citation analysis, five main clusters were identified and the main constructs of each cluster were extracted along with important theories, contexts, and methods. With the help of these constructs, the antecedents and consequences of the digital content marketing process were presented. Co-occurrence analysis recognized new trends in this field to complete the framework.

Based on the ADO-TCM framework, five important antecedents of the digital content marketing process were introduced: social media characteristics, source characteristics, content characteristics, consumer characteristics, and online community characteristics. Consumer participation or non-participation is a behavioral decision that originates from the digital content marketing process, which ultimately leads to brand engagement as the output of the process. Finally, culture and artificial intelligence were introduced as important contexts to facilitate this process.

Today's social media and social networking sites (SNS) have had a significant impact on how people receive information and news. A recent report from the Pew Research Center shows that most adults in the United States rely heavily on social media for news, and that number has been increasing in recent years. These new sources of information also mean that people are now exposed to a large number of commercials on a daily basis, most of which are embedded in social networks. In the meantime, we are facing the phenomenon of social influence. Social influence is a concept that includes a wide range of phenomena such as socialization, obedience, compliance, conformity and persuasion. This concept refers to the process of changing opinions, attitudes and behaviors as a result of interacting with people around us. Currently, a large part of social interactions takes place in online environments where social influence processes occur. The convergence of collective and interpersonal communication, which is characteristic of online communication and especially social media, helps to increase the complexity of social influence processes. Technological capabilities have dramatically changed the traditional communication approach in terms of message control, audience scale, source ambiguity, receiver ambiguity, and temporal ambiguity, and as a result, have affected the process of social influence. In addition, today, the emergence and popularity of social networks has led to a change in consumers' media consumption and the means of communication between customers and brands have undergone fundamental changes. Currently, many brands, including retail brands and consumer goods, clothing, tourism, beauty products, etc., use different social media platforms, and many of them have added social media to their marketing strategies. Social media are considered to be an effective way to attract new customers and retain customers, because they rely on the users’ generated data, which are considered more reliable than the content available on the official websites of companies. These social networks are able to create real connections between users and brands, which has a positive effect on the performance results of brands. The ability to use these social networks in marketing actions has made them one of the research priorities of the marketing field. Among the most popular social network platforms is Instagram, which has the fastest growing number of users among social networks. This social network has succeeded in attracting the attention of social network users by continuously providing new and attractive features. One of Instagram's recent actions has been providing special capabilities for businesses so that these businesses can easily use this social network to achieve their business goals.Social media influencers act as digital opinion leaders, observers, and strategic communication actors on various social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok. Influencers' embedded advertising messages are often seen as honest opinions, so they are highly persuasive. In addition, influencers and their groups of followers are involved in a mediated relationship, and there is evidence that the quality of this relationship affects the effectiveness of influencers' advertising messages. Horton and Wohl have called this relationship a para-social relationship, which is intended to be an illusory close relationship between the audience and the media personality. Given the significance of influencer marketing, and the diffused knowledge in the body of literature, this study attempts to take a comprehensive look at the agents influencing the para-social relationships process to enhance the effectiveness of influencer marketing on social media. With the help of the Bibliometrix® package of R and VOSviewer software, the science performance and the scientific network were discussed and mapped. By showing four main clusters in the co-citation analysis, theories, contexts, and main constructs of the field were identified, and by co-occurrence analysis, the recent trends were identified, which all eventually presented in the conceptual framework. The most common antecedents and consequences of influencer marketing were presented together with contexts.

Bibliometric systematic review has been applied to identify and analyze thematic trends in para-social relationships and influencer marketing scopes. Bibliometric analysis is a specific scientific field that examines the evolution of knowledge, scientific quality, and the impact of resources in this field from an objective and quantitative perspective. The bibliometric method generally has two main parts: (1) performance analysis and (2) intellectual mapping of science. In the section on performance analysis, the actions of authors, countries, and scientific institutes and their contribution to scientific development in a field are inquired, while knowledge maps are used to recognize the intellectual structure of a field and examine time trends and current issues in each period.

By using co-citation analysis, not only the most influential publications are identified, but also researchers can find thematic clusters. Here, thematic clusters were extracted based on the mentioned publications. With at least 15 Citations, total number of 13258 cited references was considered which results in 84 items (34 in cluster 1, 19 in cluster 2, 16 in cluster3, 15 in cluster 4), 4 clusters, 3388 links and total links strength 18086. In the performance analysis section, the most-cited countries, authors, and articles were identified. The United States, China, and Germany were the most prominent countries in this field. In the co-citation analysis, four main clusters were identified and the main constructs of each cluster were drawn out along with substantial theories, contexts, and methods. With the help of these constructs, the antecedents and consequences of the influencer marketing process were presented. Co-occurrence analysis considered new trends in this field that help to complete the framework.

Based on the ADO-TCM framework, five important antecedents of the influencer marketing process were introduced: influencers’ characteristics, audience characteristics, social media characteristics, content characteristics, and para-social relationships characteristics. Creating and developing para-social relationships is the most important behavioral decision and increasing the effectiveness of influencer marketing is the most important output of the influencer marketing process. Finally, culture and artificial intelligence were introduced as important contexts to facilitate this process that was not seen in the literature. So, the current literature has the ability to develop and grow, at least from a theoretical perspective, because the lack of a comprehensive framework that does not focus on only one element or part of the process and identifies various influential factors of influencer marketing is felt.

The study of scientific production and research on the distribution channels of tourism in recent years can provide a road map for a better future. Therefore Peugeh has been working with the purpose of analyzing bilibiometric researches published on the Web of Science Web site on the topic of distribution of tourism from the beginning to the present and drawing the world's scientific map (over the past 35 years). This research is a bibliometric study and 142 scientific sources on the topic of the distribution of tourism channels from the Web of Science Web site were subject to bimetric analysis. Data analysis was performed by the facilities of this site as well as the VOS viewer software, a visualization software. The retrieved sources covered scientific outputs from 1983 to 2018. The results of this study indicate the upward trend in the publication of articles in the field of distribution channels in the last 10 years. Most articles in 2018, 26 articles, and the highest citations in 2018 were 212 citations. Most of the publications in this field were original articles (55.63%) and from the countries of China, then Spain, the United States, New Zealand and Taiwan. The compilation of a network of journals in the field of tourism distribution channels was displayed in 3 clusters with a total of 275 joint authorizations. Key words also evolved from the status of the tourism supply approach to the tourism system approach and, ultimately, the tourism demand approach.

In the present study, two new bibliometric techniques named RPYS and RPYS-CO have been used to identify evolutionary and historical trends of research in entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the influential works and scientists in the evolution of this field have been analyzed from the perspective of bibliographic data. This research is applied in terms of goal, and is descriptive in terms of data gathering. The statistical population of this paper includes 13723 articles published in the field of entrepreneurship. Data were gathered from Web of Science. After retrieving and extracting all references in the articles, they were analyzed using CRExplorer software. Results showed that in the period from 1700 to 2016, there are 18 historical peaks in the field of entrepreneurship. Based on the findings, the most influential works in the periods under review are “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith (1776), Marshall's “Principles of Economics” (1890), and “The Theory of Economic Development” by Schumpeter in 1934. The results showed that the process of information exchange in the course of evolution in the field of Entrepreneurship is mainly done through the book channel.