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Strategic Management Journal
Strat. Mgmt. J., 25: 981–1004 (2004)
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/smj.397
CHANGESINTHEINTELLECTUALSTRUCTURE
OFSTRATEGICMANAGEMENTRESEARCH:
ABIBLIOMETRICSTUDYOFTHESTRATEGIC
MANAGEMENTJOURNAL,1980–2000
´ ´ ´
ANTONIO-RAFAELRAMOS-RODRIGUEZ*andJOSERUIZ-NAVARRO
Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, University of Cadiz,´ Cad´ iz, Spain
The aim of this paper is to identify the works that have had the greatest impact on strategic
management research and to analyze the changes that have taken place in the intellectual struc-
ture of this discipline. The methodology is based on the bibliometric techniques of citation and
co-citation analysis which are applied to all the articles published in the Strategic Management
Journal from its first issue in 1980 through 2000. Copyright 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
... a statistical record of ideas ... would allow The purpose of this paper is to gain an impres-
us to identify the precise moment in history that sion of strategic management research and its evo-
ideas emerge, chronicle their growth and spread, lution by considering the works of a great number
determine the exact duration of their validity in of researchers in the field over an extended period
the collective mind and afterwards trace their path of time using bibliometric methods. The aim,
towards decline, erosion into mere cliche and ulti-
´
mate disappearance beyond the horizon of time. following the suggestion of White and McCain
(Ortega y Gasset, 1967) (1998), is to ascertain how the discipline has
evolved by focusing on and describing what ap-
INTRODUCTION pears, as it were, in the rear-view mirror.
The term bibliometrics refers to the mathemat-
ical and statistical analysis of patterns that appear
Once a scientific discipline has reached a certain in the publication and use of documents (Diodato,
degree of maturity, it is common practice for 1994). The techniques used in this paper are known
its scholars to turn their attention towards the as citation and co-citation analysis. Citation analy-
literature generated by the scientific community sis is based on the premise that authors cite docu-
and, treating it as a research topic in its own right, mentstheyconsider to be important in the develop-
to conduct reviews of the literature with a view ment of their research. Therefore, frequently cited
to assessing the general state of the art. Normally, documents are likely to have exerted a greater
these types of study are considered as adopting the influence on the discipline than those less fre-
impressionist approach and their findings tend to quently cited (Culnan, 1987; Tahai and Meyer,
reflect the subjective views of their authors. 1999).
Similarly, co-citation analysis of documents
Keywords: strategic management research; bibliometrics; records the number of papers that have cited any
co-citation analysis particular pair of documents and it is interpreted
∗ ´
Correspondence to: Antonio-Rafael Ramos-Rodrıguez, Faculty as a measure for similarity of content of the two
of Economic and Management Sciences, University of Cadiz,
´ documents. The approach is instrumental in iden-
Duque de Najera 8, 11.002 Cadiz, Spain.
´ ´
E-mail: rafael.ramos@uca.es tifying groupings of authors, topics, or methods
Copyright 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 26 February 2002
Final revision received 1 December 2003
´ ´
982 A.-R. Ramos-Rodrıguez and J. Ruız-Navarro
and can help us understand the way in which study; Hoffman and Holbrook (1993) examine
these clusters interrelate (Pilkington and Liston- the intellectual structure of Consumer Research
Heyes, 1999). White and Griffith (1981), McCain by conducting a bibliometric study of the Jour-
¨
(1990), and White and McCain (1998) give a nal of Consumer Research; Usdiken and Pasadeos
detailed description of this procedure for author (1995) investigate the reasons that lead European
co-citation analysis. Its validity as a means of and North American authors to select different
exploring the intellectual structure of a scientific paths of research in the field of Organization Stud-
discipline has been amply demonstrated in numer- ies; Pasadeos, Phelps, and Kim (1998) identify
ous studies (Small, 1973; White and Griffith, 1981; the most influential authors and works in adver-
McCain, 1986; Culnan, O’Reilly, and Chatman, tising research and describe the co-citation net-
1990; White and McCain, 1998; Ding, Chowd- works that exist between them; Tahai and Meyer
hury, and Foo, 1999). (1999) published a journal citation analysis in the
Therefore, starting from the hypothesis that the Strategic ManagementJournal to identify the most
bibliographic references cited in research papers influential journals in the field of Management;
are a reliable indication of their influence, the aim Pilkington and Liston-Heyes (1999) use biblio-
of the present study is to identify the more influ- metric techniques (factorial analysis of co-citation
ential documents and analyze the relational links matrix) to investigate the intellectual pillars of
between them, in order to appreciate the changes the Production and Operations Management lit-
that have taken place in the intellectual structure erature and explore whether these are distinct
of strategic management research. from those commonly associated with its rival
Useful value added is offered by this paper, not fields: Operations Research, Management Science,
´
only because it is the first to apply bibliometric and Industrial Engineering. Ramos-Rodrıguez and
´
techniques to strategic management research liter- Ruız-Navarro (2000) explore the intellectual struc-
ature, but also because, in so doing, it complements ture of Strategic Change research by conducting
andimprovesthefindingsofotherstudiesthathave an author, work, and journal co-citation analysis
approached the subject from the qualitative per- of a 30-year period. Recently, Ponzi (2002) has
spective. It is, however, no substitute for extensive explored the intellectual structure and interdisci-
reading and fine-grained content analysis (White plinary breadth of Knowledge Management in its
and McCain, 1998). early stage of development, using principal com-
The paper is divided into four main sections. ponent analysis on an author co-citation frequency
The first is a review of literature; the second con- matrix.
tains a description of the methodology employed, To the best of our knowledge, no such study
in particular, the co-citation technique; the third has dealt with the field of strategic management
presents and discusses the results of the empirical research; therefore this paper aims to fill a gap
study; and, finally, the fourth section presents a in strategic management literature by applying
summary and discussion of the conclusions to be bibliometric techniques to a representative col-
drawn from this investigation, indicates its limita- lection of research articles relating to this disci-
tions, and suggests future research. plinary area, with the intention of complement-
ing and enhancing the findings of other studies
that have described it from a more qualitative
LITERATUREREVIEW perspective.
Several articles report the use of bibliometric
techniques to study other areas of management METHODOLOGY
research. For example, Culnan (1987) maps the
intellectual structure of Information Systems Man- Instead of using books, doctoral theses, or scien-
agement research by conducting a co-citation anal- tific congress records as our source of scientific
ysis of works published by a series of authors who documents for the purposes of this study, we chose
could be considered representative of the disci- to use articles published in a journal, because these
pline; Culnan et al. (1990) explore the structure of can be considered ‘certified knowledge.’ This is
Organizational Behavior research by applying fac- the term commonly used to describe knowledge
torial analysis techniques in an author co-citation that has been submitted to the critical review of
Copyright 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strat. Mgmt. J., 25: 981–1004 (2004)
The Intellectual Structure of Strategic Management Research 983
fellow researchers and has succeeded in gaining but simply to register changes over the course of
their approval. Research articles play a fundamen- time, we opted to divide the study period into three
tal role in the said certification process (Callon, equal and consecutive sub-periods, each spanning
Courtial, and Penan, 1993). The use of citations 7 years.
1
from articles in research journals, moreover, is a From the Social Science Citation Index via
standard practice that enhances the reliability of CICA (Andalusian Centre for Scientific Data), we
results. retrieved the set of all articles published in the
To obtain a representative collection of strategic SMJ from 1980 through 2000. We then created
management research articles, we decided to take a file with all the references cited in the said
all the articles published in the Strategic Manage- articles. There are, however, certain inconsisten-
2
ment Journal (SMJ) from its first issue in 1980 cies in the coding used in the database. Since
3
through 2000. The reasoning behind this choice the bibliometric software employed in this study
can be summarized as follows: (1) by their nature, recognizes only exactly coinciding strings of char-
all the published articles address strategic manage- acters, a manual normalization process is required
ment issues, which saves us the arduous task of in order to guarantee accuracy, especially in the
sifting through other journals in search of articles spelling of authors’ names, the journals in which
relating to the discipline that concerns us; (2) this the articles appear, and the first edition of each
publication enjoys a reputation as a leader among book cited.
management journals, particularly those dealing Bibliometric analyses have traditionally been
with business strategy (Tahai and Meyer, 1999); divided into two categories, according to whether
(3) it is highly regarded by researchers in the they yield activity or relationship indicators. The
field; (4) being a publication that is unrestricted former provide data relating to the force of impact
in its willingness to accept contributions, it is a or strength of influence of research efforts, while
true reflection of the current topics of scientific the latter trace the links and interaction between
interest; (5) its entire contents are to be found in different researchers and different fields of re-
databases of the type required for citation analysis search. The end result is a full description of
techniques. the content of the research effort and its develop-
There is, however, some bias involved in this ment (Callon et al., 1993). Citation and co-citation
choice. A large number of journals publish articles analysis, respectively, are the techniques most fre-
dealing with issues of strategy, but, since they are quently used to obtain these indicators.
not specialized in strategic management, a labori- The study was conducted in two separate stages
ous selection process would be required in order (Figure 1). The first stage was a citation analy-
to find articles dealing exclusively with strate- sis to compute the frequency of citation of the
gic management. Nor have all of these journals bibliographic references used in all the articles
been copied onto databases of the type required analyzed, in order to identify the works that had
for this kind of research. We are, however, rea- made most impact on the scientific community.
sonably confident that the articles analyzed are The sample period of 21 years was then divided
a representative sample of strategic management into three equal, consecutive 7-year sub-periods:
research. 1980–86, 1987–93, and 1994–00, and the study
The SMJ serves to define the development of
this field (Hoskisson et al., 1999) and signifies 1 Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) is a database that records
the field’s move towards a new paradigm, by not only the title, authors, source, keywords, and other data
which it has become a more ‘scientific,’ empir- relating to each article but also the bibliographic references
ically oriented research discipline (Schendel and contained in it. It is, therefore, an index of citations managed
by the U.S. Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which
Hofer, 1979). By using the SMJ, therefore, our has registered the contents of approximately 4100 journals of
study covers the period during which the discipline worldwide distribution dating back to 1972.
has achieved its full development. 2 Thus, we find that ‘PORTER ME, 1980, COMPETITIVE
Moreover, since it was our aim to assess changes STRATEGY’and‘PORTERM,1980,COMPETITIVESTRAT-
EGY’aretwocitationsofthesamewell-knownworkbyMichael
in influence of the most cited works, it was nec- E. Porter; in the first citation the author’s name is coded with
essary to divide the study period into a number two initials and in the second with only one.
of sub-periods. Accordingly, bearing in mind that 3 We used BIBEXCEL software, designed by Professor Olle
it was not our intention to identify real periods Persson of the Institute of Information Sciences at the University
of Umea (Sweden).
˚
Copyright 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strat. Mgmt. J., 25: 981–1004 (2004)
´ ´
984 A.-R. Ramos-Rodrıguez and J. Ruız-Navarro
All articles published in
Strategic Management Journal: 1980-2000
Impact indicators
Citation count 7-year subperiods
1980-86; 1986-93; 1994-2000
Co-citation matrix
Descriptive analysis
Convert to correlation matrix
Selection of unit to map
Changes in influence
Multidimensional Scaling
Interpretation and discussion Maps
Relation indicators
Figure 1. Design of the empirical study
CITATION SAMPLE (n articles)
Article # 1 Article # 2 Article # 3 Article # n
REFERENCES: REFERENCES: REFERENCES: REFERENCES:
Author 1 (1987) Author 10 (1998) Author 15 (1998) Author 2 (1998)
Author 2 (1998) Author 6 (2001) Author 16 (1998) (...) Author 20 (1998)
Author 3 (1999) Author 11 (1998) Author 2 (1998) Author 6 (2001)
Author 4 (2000) Author 12 (1998) Author 6 (2001) Author 21 (1998)
Author 5 (1998) Author 13 (1998) Author 17 (1998) Author 22 (1998)
Author 6 (2001) Author 14 (1998) Author 18 (1998) Author 23 (1998)
Author 7 (2002) Author 19 (1998) Author 6 (2001)
Author 8 (1969) Author 24 (1998)
Author 9 (2000)
Co-citation [Author 2 (1998), Author 6 (2001)] = 3
Figure 2. Co-citation count
was repeated in order to observe any changes that between them and identify schools of thought and
might have taken place in the influence of these prevailing topics of research.
works. Co-citation analysis is based on the distribution
The second stage was to perform a co-citation frequencies obtained from the citations count, by
analysis based on the most cited document of the forming all the pairs possible from the 100 most
whole sample period (1980–2000), and of each frequently cited documents and counting all the
of the sub-periods, in order to trace relationships articles that cite both documents (Figure 2). These
Copyright 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strat. Mgmt. J., 25: 981–1004 (2004)
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