Mapping Business Model Research: A Document Bibliometric Analysis

Today, the business model (BM) is one of the most studied concepts within managerial and innovation literature.Although scholars have shown a growing interest in understanding and analysing the BM, a theoretical con-ceptualization is still lacking. This paper provides a systematic review of the current state of BM research bymapping the research landscape to identify key research publications, journals that had relevance in developingthe BM literature, and the main areas of research. Using the ISI Web of Knowledge“core collection”, this studyconducts a document bibliometric analysis of 3,604 publications in thefields of management and business thatwere published between 1985 and 2017. The use of quantitative methods allowed us to overcome the short-comings of the past subjective literature reviews. We clustered the selected articles on the basis of two distinctperspectives. First, we identified the founders of the discipline, creating a map of co-cited articles (co-citationanalysis); this enabled us to identifyfive major research clusters, formed on the basis of similar co-citations, thatcharacterize the historical evolution of the BM studies. Second, throughout the bibliographic coupling analysis,which aggregates articles sharing a similar bibliography, we captured the main emergent research sub-fields ofthe most recent BM literature.