Top Entrepreneurship Research in the Past 20 years: Topics and Impacts

Entrepreneurship has long represented an academic discipline whose consensual meaning has been fragile among many scholars in management, economics or other disciplines within business. That said, over the past two decades the discipline has come in its own, as there exists a critical mass of scholars who have developed a shared conception of its meaning (Astley, 1985). However, we have witnessed both shifts in the topics that entrepreneurship scholars study and the journal outlets they target. In addition, a review of entrepreneurship research also revealed new topics that have emerged and become prominent. Moreover, the best entrepreneurship research several decades ago was only published in specialized journals. However, here too, we have observed that some ‘pure’ entrepreneurship papers make their way into top management journals. To further gain deeper insight into these two trends this paper consists of two distinct studies. The first study makes use of topic modeling as a novel approach, to discern the topics studied in the entrepreneurship literature as well as how topics have evolved over time. The second study builds on the first study in that it identifies topics that can be found in entrepreneurship journals and others that are also to be found in management journals. In addition, we use both the topics and journals to predict article impact and expect that the topic is a more significant factor than journal. Our observation timespan covers the 2000-2020 period which captures the trends outlined above.