Intellectual structure of entrepreneurship research: A bibliometric study, 1956--2003

Entrepreneurship is "a burning" subject for the society, educative institutions and the academic investigation. In individual, generally it is accepted by academic and professional the affirmation of which the scientific discipline of entrepreneurship is a young and emergent field. Nevertheless, little empirical evidence exists that sustains the appreciations made on its origin, evolution, social structure and thematic of investigation.; On the contrary, it exists a clear discord between the academic ones on its definition, scope and other numerous aspects. In this sense, he is habitual to find valuations little encouraging because the state of development of the investigation on entrepreneurship is in its pre-theoretical state (Dery and Toulouse, 1996), happens through its stage of adolescence (Gregoire, Dery and Bechard, 2001) and has obtained to a progress limited towards its consolidation like discipline of knowledge (Aldrich and Baker, 1997; Romano and Ratnatunga, 1996; Busenitz et al., 2003). All these appreciations and still more disquieting others cause that entrepreneurship research deserves to be analyzed.; For that reason, there is interesting similarity to explore the development of the academic investigation on the entrepreneurship phenomenon with the intention to obtain a general vision of the discipline that studies it and that allows to its suitable valuation and understanding. This generic objective has taken shape with the exposition of a series of questions of investigation related to four concrete aspects: the evolution of the scientific production, the social structure of its authors, the most influential documents and the structure of its knowledge base.; In order to approach these questions it has been chosen to use a quantitative approach. In particular, after making a revision of literature on bibliometric methods and another one on investigations that have used to the own discipline of entrepreneurship as study object, a collection of representative works of the investigation in this discipline has been compiled by means of a search by key words and has been analyzed systematically with bibliometric techniques.