Outsourcing in Business and Management Studies: A Co-Citation Analysis

Outsourcing is a critical issue for an enterprise in the past two decades. It extended from the local operation service to the global service and influenced enterprise decision making process. Companies need to create competitive advantage from cost reduction, especially via outsourcing their operational activities. The purpose of this article is to bring up a visual mapping of two-dimensional intellectual structure and to recognize the subfields of the outsourcing through co-citation analysis. In this study, we collected some papers from ISI Web of Knowledge (WoS) database in the outsourcing area. We rank the outsourcing documents by times cited and collect the top 60 articles. Also, we use multidimensional scaling (MDS) and clustering techniques (CT) to create the two-dimensional maps to show the intellectual structure of outsourcing dynamically. The conclusion would provide for the researchers' reference.