Mapping the intellectual structure of family firm research and proposing a research agenda

In this chapter, we conduct bibliometric performance analyses and a co-citation analysis on all articles relating to family firms indexed in Scopus and Web of Science and all articles published in the Family Business Review, Journal of Family Business Management, and the Journal of Family Business Strategy. Based on the literature sample of 4,056 articles published between 1960 and 2020 by 3,600 authors in 783 journals and their 175,163 references, we identify the most productive and most cited journals, the most cited authors, and the 25 most cited articles. Our science mapping reveals the agency theory, definitions, entrepreneurship, internationalization, ownership, resources, socioemotional wealth, and succession as the predominant research themes in family firm research. Whereas entrepreneurship explicitly appears in one of the clusters, innovation does not yet. Based on our findings, we propose a research framework and point to several research gaps to be addressed by future research.