Intellectual Structure of International New Venture Research: A Bibliometric Analysis and Suggestions for a Future Research Agenda

Abstract

We examine the intellectual structure of the international new venture (INV) literature using bibliometric citation and co-citation analysis. We aim to identify the most influential papers/authors, publication outlets, and key research topics. We focus on the top 100 most-cited papers in this field published between 1994 and 2015. In the post-hoc reading, we supplement our main bibliometric techniques with the qualitative content analysis method to shed light on a number of theoretical and empirical issues. We find that the literature has grown significantly in the past two decades. However, the main factors that hinder the field are the diversity of applicable theoretical perspectives and the inconsistencies between theoretical concepts and measurements of variables in empirics. We outline a detailed future research agenda to address these inconsistencies and recommend using new lenses from international business to examine the INV phenomenon.