Assessment of the history and trends of “The Journal of Intellectual Capital”: a bibliometrics, altmetrics and text mining analysis
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-02-2020-0057 |
| Published date | 29 April 2021 |
| Date | 29 April 2021 |
| Pages | 864-912 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Knowledge management,HR & organizational behaviour,Organizational structure/dynamics,Accounting & finance,Accounting/accountancy,Behavioural accounting |
| Author | Mohammadreza Esmaeili Givi,Mohammad Karim Saberi,Mojtaba Talafidaryani,Mahdi Abdolhamid,Rahim Nikandish,Abbas Fattahi |
Assessment of the history and
trends of “The Journal of
Intellectual Capital”:
a bibliometrics, altmetrics and text
mining analysis
Mohammadreza Esmaeili Givi
Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Management, University of Tehran,
Tehran, Iran
Mohammad Karim Saberi
Department of Medical Library and Information Sciences, School of Paramedicine,
Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, Hamadan, Iran
Mojtaba Talafidaryani
Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
Mahdi Abdolhamid
Department of Management and Philosophy of Science and Technology,
School of Management, Economics and Progress Engineering,
Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran
Rahim Nikandish
Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, and
Abbas Fattahi
Student Research Committee, Hamadan University of Medical Sciences,
Hamadan, Iran
Abstract
Purpose –The Journal of Intellectual Capital (JIC) celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2020. Therefore, the
present study aims to provide a general overview of the history and key trends in this journal during
2000–2019.
Design/methodology/approach –Two types of citation and textual data during a 20-year journal period
were retrieved from the Scopus database . The citation structures and contents were explored based on a
combination of bibli ometric analysis, altmetri c analysis and text mining. The jou rnal themes and trends of
their changes were analyzed through citation bursts, mapping and topic modeling. To make a better
comparison, the text mining process for the topic modeling of the IC field was performed in addition to the
topic modeling of JIC .
Findings –Bibliometric analysis indicated that JIC has experienced a remarkable growth in terms of the
number of publications and citations over the last 20 years. The results indicated that JIC plays a significant
role among IC researchers. Additionally, a large number of researchers, institutes and countries have made
contributions to this journal and cited its research papers. Altmetric analysis showed that JIC has been shared
in different social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Mendeley, Citeulike, news and blogs. Text
mining abstract of JIC articles indicated that “measurement,”“financial performance”and “IC reporting”have
the relative prevalence with increasing trends over the past 20 years. In addition, “research trends”and
“national and international studies”had a stable trend with low thematic share.
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The study was funded by Vice-chancellor for Research and Technology, Hamadan University of
Medical Sciences (No. 9903061309).
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1469-1930.htm
Received 28 February 2020
Revised 12 July 2020
15 October 2020
17 January 2021
10 March 2021
Accepted 12 March 2021
Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 23 No. 4, 2022
pp. 864-912
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-02-2020-0057
Research limitations/implications –The findings have important implications for the JIC editorial team in
order to make informed decisions about the further development of JIC as well as for IC researchers and
practitioners to make more valuable contributions to the journal.
Originality/value –Using bibliometric analysis, altmetric analysis and text mining, this study provided a
systematic and comprehensive analysis of JIC. The simultaneous use of these methods provides an interesting,
unique and suitable capacity to analyze the journals by considering their various aspects.
Keywords Intellectual capital, Intellectual structure, Bibliometric analysis, Altmetric analysis, LDA, Topic
modeling, JIC
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The editorial team of Journal of Intellectual Capital (JIC) has recently announced a special
issue call for papers for celebrating the 20th anniversary of the journal (JIC, 2019), which
motivated the current study to be conducted for evaluating the history and trends of JIC and
Intellectual Capital (IC) research.
JIC, as an international leading scholarly journal in the field of IC, is a double-blind, peer-
reviewedjournal which publishes theoretical and empiricalstudies on various issues related to
identifying, creating,measuring, securing and managing intellectual capital in organizations.
JIC makes original contributions to the IC literature to enrich the discussions among IC
scholars and practitioners by offering unprecedented theories and best practices (JIC, 2021).
The impact factorof JIC was 4.805 in 2019 by Clarivate Analytics,which was considered as the
30th journal among 152journals in the Business category and the 33rd among 226 journalsin
Management (JCR, 2020). In addition, its cite score was 8.6 in 2019 by Scopus, which
was regarded as the 10th journalamong 1,254 journals in Social Sciences (Education) and the
6th among 221 journals in Business, Management, and Accounting (General Business,
Management, and Accounting) category(SJR, 2020). Obviously, based on these index values,
JIC not only plays a significant roleon the IC field, but is considered as an outstanding title in
the social sciences, as well as business and managementdisciplines.
There havebeen growing thought-provokingdisputations and ground-breaking evolutions
in IC researchduring the developmentof a theoretical framework asthe first identified stage of
IC research to thedevelopment of regional and national IC as the recently introduced stage of
this field of research, which are considered as being under development (Pedro et al., 2018a).
Meanwhile,JIC has been consideredas a principal actor leadingthe disputationsand evolutions
during its two-decade life (Bamel et al., 2020;Bellucci et al.,2020;Lin and Edvinsson, 2020),
which has allocatedan idiosyncratic placefrom thematic inclusion (Dumay,2014;Serenko and
Bontis, 2013) and thenumber of published papers (Pedro et al.,2018b).
In addition, it is essential to monitor the evolving literature, particularly in this journal, to
move toward new research areas based on the knowledge base of the IC field by considering
the continuous progress of IC literature and the prominent role of JIC.
Bibliometrics is a common method in journal analysis and can provide valuable research
policies for scientific community members, especially editors, authors, and journal audiences
(Antons et al., 2016;Morkunas et al., 2019;Restrepo and Willett, 2017). In addition, it is
considered as a set of methods for analyzing scientific literature quantitatively by using
bibliographic data (De Bellis, 2009).
According to Pritchard (1969), bibliometrics is the application of mathematical and
statistical methods to books, theses, reports, monographs, papers in journals, as well as e-
books, e-journals and Web during the recent years (Pritchard, 1969;Mokhtari et al., 2019).
Lotka (1926) published his pioneering research on the frequency distribution of scientific
productivity determined from a decennial index (1907–1916) in Chemical Abstracts. Lotka
reported that the number of authors making ncontributions is about 1/n
2
compared to those
Assessment of
the history and
trends
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making one, and the proportion of all contributors making a single contribution is about 60%
(Glanzel, 2003).
Researchers, institutions, countries and their relationships can be identified and mapped
by using bibliometric analysis (
€
Ozcose and Gencer, 2017), which is considered as a tool for
determining the status of research conducted in a journal, field, institution or country.
Bibliometrics aims to identify potential trends and gaps in knowledge and plays an important
role in management and decision-making in science and technology (Romanelli et al., 2018).
Descriptive techniques, science mapping and visualization are used in bibliometric
analysis (Tang et al., 2018) in order to examine the evolution of a field of knowledge or a
journal and its historical structure (Garfield, 2004).
Employing such bibliometric approaches provides necessary analysis for examining,
tracing and identifying the intellectual linkages of a specific academic field, as well as
directing its future development (Appio et al., 2014;Ardito et al., 2019). In other words, the
structure and trend of discussions and contributions to a given field can be revealed, leading
to the realization of the retrospective and prospective organization of the research realms and
their relationships, as well as the location of research gaps and orientation of research lines
(Appio et al., 2016;Donthu et al., 2020). Moreover, these techniques offer objective metrics of
assessing scientific outlets which contrast the potential cognitive bias of subjective
assessments, and thus introduce an important complement of analytical ability among
scholars (Appio et al., 2014).
The term “bibliometric”has been widely used in analyzing various journals since it was
suggested by Pritchard (1969).
The application of these analyses on the publications with such an extended time period
provides an unprecedented and holistic insight on JIC and IC research, which could be
considered as the most important contribution of this study. Hopefully, the implications of
this study will help unify the dispersed IC literature (Pedro et al., 2018a) and fulfill the lack in
reviewing the JIC papers exclusively (Bellucci et al., 2020).
JIC, as a pioneering journal in the subject area, has attracted a great deal of attention from
researchers and readers around the world. Therefore, it is important to have a bibliometric
overview of this journal. Accordingly, this study aims to provide an overview of the journal
performance during 2000–2019.
To evaluate the history and trends of JIC and IC research, the following questions were
formulated.
(1) What are the annual citation trends, highly cited papers, leading authors, universities
and emerging trends and hotspots in JIC?
(2) What is the co-authorship map of highly productive countries, co-occurrence map of
highly frequent keywords, and co-citation map of highly-cited sources and authors in
JIC?
(3) What are the altmetric scores of highly-cited articles in JIC?
(4) What are the prominent topics in JIC and IC research and their evolution?
To do so, the articles related to JIC and IC topics published during 2000–2019 were retrieved.
Then, bibliographical attributes, alternative metrics, and textual fields of these documents
were analyzed by the bibliometrics, altmetrics and text mining analyses, which are
considered as objective approaches for reviewing and describing research fields.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the literature review.
Section 3 describes the research method. The results are reported in Section 4. Finally, the
discussion and conclusion are provided in Section 5.
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