Bibliometric analysis of entrepreneurial orientation

Purpose The remarkable concept of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has attracted scholars' attention for its relevance to a firm's performance. Based on bibliometric and distance-based visualization of similarities (VOS) analysis, the purpose of this paper is to outline a broad-spectrum perspective of the structure of research in EO across more than 20 years of publications, identifying the most prominent journals, authors and articles in this field. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses the Web of Science Core Collection and the VOS viewer software. The analysis searches for all the documents connected to EO available in the database from 1976 to 2017. The graphical visualization maps the bibliographic data using both bibliographic coupling and co-citation data. Findings Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Journal, Journal of Business Venturing and Family Business Review are the most relevant journals in the field. Among the many important authors in the EO literature, key contributors are Lumpkin, Payne, Short, Covin, Dess and Wiklund. Three different streams of research are linked to the EO concept; strategy and entrepreneurship, family business and miscellaneous work in psychometrics, methods, marketing and knowledge/capability-based approaches to organizations. Originality/value This paper contributes to EO research by providing a global perspective on the concept's investigation, using bibliometric data and graphical networks.