Founders and disseminators of cluster research

The purpose of this article is to review cluster research and its evolution by considering the works of the most prominent researchers in the field over an extended period of time using a bibliometric analysis based on statistical analysis and social network tools. The point of departure is an original database, created by the authors, consisting of 1586 academic articles about clusters or industrial districts that were published from 1989 to 2010 in international scientific journals. The article identifies a group of articles belonging to the main disseminators of the cluster concept. A backward citation analysis discovers further contributions, which are grouped into subcommunities via a clustering algorithm. The procedure enables not only the identification of local research communities based largely around sub-disciplines but also boundary spanners linking different communities of scholars scattered around the world. In so doing, we offer a picture of the origin and development of the cluster concept along with a new interpretation of the features that boosted the rhetorical power of cluster research: multi-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary and global dimension.