The extent and impact of intellectual capital research: a two decade analysis
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-05-2020-0142 |
| Published date | 22 September 2020 |
| Date | 22 September 2020 |
| Pages | 375-400 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Knowledge management,HR & organizational behaviour,Organizational structure/dynamics,Accounting & finance,Accounting/accountancy,Behavioural accounting |
| Author | Umesh Bamel,Vijay Pereira,Manlio Del Giudice,Yama Temouri |
The extent and impact of
intellectual capital research:
a two decade analysis
Umesh Bamel
Organization Behaviour and Human Resources,
International Management Institute New Delhi, New Delhi, India
Vijay Pereira
Neoma Business School, Reims Campus, Reims, France
Manlio Del Giudice
Management University of Rome Link Campus University, Lazio, Italy and
National Research University Higher School of Economic,
Moscow, Russian Federation, and
Yama Temouri
Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and
Aston University, Birmingham, UK
Abstract
Purpose –This paper examines the leading publication trends including the extent and impact of intellectual
capitalresearch inthe Journal of Intellectual Capital (JIC) over a two-decade period (2000–2020). The bibliometric
analysis offers the description of publications trends such as key authors, articles, cited references, institutions
and countries—in other words the extent and impact in the field. This paper also presents the knowledge
structure (including conceptual, intellectual and social structures) of JIC, that is prominent themes, co-citation
and bibliographic networks.
Design/methodology/approach –In order to achieve research objectives, we collected the bibliographic
information of the articles published in JIC for the period 2000 to 2020 from the Scopus database on 11.04.2020.
The bibliographic information of 737 documents were analysed using to open source analysis tool, that is
bibliometrics package in r software and VOSviewer. These tools were used to create the graphical visualization
of bibliographic data on basis of co-occurrence, co-citation and bibliographic coupling.
Findings –The results show that the journal is progressing in terms of publication quantity and reputation in
the field. To date, 737 documents have been published in JIC, which includes 659 research articles, eight
editorials, seven notes and 63 review papers. This paper also portrays the author impact list in terms of most
impactful articles published in JIC. Country-wise Italy, Australia, and USA exert maximum influence on JIC
scholarship.
Originality/value –Bibliographic analysis offers a comprehensive understanding of past trends and
presents the future direction of a journal.
Keywords Bibliometrix, Bibliometric, Citation analysis, Intellectual capital disclosure, Intellectual capital
reporting, Journal of Intellectual Capital, Knowledge management, Scopus, h-index
Paper type Literature review
1. Introduction
The journal of intellectual capital (JIC) is a double-blind peer reviewed leading international
journal within the intellectual capital domain. JIC primarily publishes research on various
topicalities of intellectual capital within the context of a modern knowledge
economy(Bongiovanni et al., 2020;Oliveira et al., 2020;Popkova and Sergi, 2020). JIC is
Extent and
impact of
intellectual
capital research
375
The article is based on the study funded by the Basic Research Program of the National Research
University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’.
Received 6 May 2020
Revised 17 July 2020
Accepted 12 August 2020
Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 23 No. 2, 2022
pp. 375-400
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-05-2020-0142
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1469-1930.htm
indexed in journal citation report of Web of Science (WoS) with an impact factor of 3.744 and
in Scopus with a CiteScore of 6.48. These index values place JIC as a journal in the top quartile
in business and management categories. Rory L Chase (MD, Teleos, UK) started JIC in the
year 2000 and the journal published four issues annually, with the number of publication
frequency increasing to five issues in 2018 and further to six issues in 2019. Since its
inception, the growth and reputation of JIC has increased immensely and JIC has thus
witnessed a huge influx of submissions. JIC is a leading and distinguished title and has a
strong impact on the intellectual capital knowledge base (de Pablos and Edvinsson, 2020;Kim
et al., 2010).
Currently, Merrill Warkentin leads the journal (editor) with six editorial sections: Bradley
S. Trinkle and OfirTurel, Business research method; Xin (Robert) Luo and Bo Xu, Emerging
Topics in Intellectual Capital Research; Valentina Cillo and Stefano Fontana, Intellectual
Capital, Firm Evaluation, Organization Studies, and Sustainability; Stefano Bresciani,
Knowledge, Technology and Innovation Management; Jacques Ophoff and Karen Renaud,
Securing the Organization’s Knowledge and Information; Marco Romano and Francesco
Schiavone, Strategic Management, Human Reso urce Management, Learning Studies.
Veronica Scuotto is assisting the journal editorial leadership.
It is evident that journals usually publish a review, a special issue or an editorial to
celebrate anniversaries (Van Fleet et al., 2006;Meyer and Winer, 2014). Recently there has
been an interesting trend, that is publishing a bibliometric review of the journal whenever a
journal reaches or achieves a publishing milestone. Some of these are noted here: a
bibliometric overview of Journal of Business Research (Merig
oet al., 2015a); 50 years of
European Journal of Marketing (Mart
ınez-L
opez et al., 2018); 50 years of Financial Review
(Baker et al., 2020), as examples. Further recent examples of journals published such review
articles have been in the British Journal of Management (Pereira et al., 2019b), who analysed
three decades of emerging market research, providing future research directions; the Asia
Pacific Journal of Management (Budhwar et al., 2019), who reviewed the state of HRM in the
Middle East, identifying key challenges and providing future research agenda; the Journal of
Business Research on outsourcing and offshoring decision making (Pereira et al., 2019a,b).
Such reviewsof a journal offera comprehensive evaluationin terms of its publicationtrends
and patterns (Mart
ınez-L
opez et al.,2018;Merigo et al., 2015b). It also aims to identifypopular
themes,scholars, department/universities/countries –which contributemaximum publications
in a domain,i.e. the extent and impact in a particularfield of study. These aspectshave thus led
to a surge in such type of review publications (e.g. Bamel et al.,2020,Baker et al.,2020). In
addition,bibliometric analysishelps in visualising the structuresof a research field objectively,
that is clustering and citation patterns of related documents (Vogel et al., 2020). Thus, the
bibliometric method has gained widespread attention in recent times and is considered as a
moreobjective approach forreviewing a knowledge domainand base (Vogel et al.,2020). JIC has
recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and is now two decades old, during which it has
published 737 research documents. This has been the key motivation to thus develop this
study, whoseobjective is to describethe general publicationtrends and knowledge structurein
JIC. This reviewpiece looks at the past (i.e. evolutionand historical progression ofintellectual
capitalknowledge base), the present(i.e. current trends) andthe future (i.e. emerging trendsand
future course of development in the intellectual capital researchbase in JIC). More specifically,
this study aims to answer following two key research questions:
RQ1. What is general description and publication trend in JIC in term of top ranked
authors, top cited articles, top publishing institutes and countries and top ranked
key words?
RQ2. What is the conceptual (2a), intellectual (2b) and social (2c) structure of the extent
and impact of intellectual capital knowledge in JIC?
JIC
23,2
376
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