Twenty-five years (1992–2016) of the International Business Review: A bibliometric overview

Abstract

The International Business Review (IBR) is a leading international academic journal in the field of International Business (IB). Such leadership is reflected in the large number of publications that grow year after year and particularly in the large number of citations received from other journals of high academic prestige. The aim of this study is to conduct a bibliometric overview of the leading trends regarding the journal's publications and citations since its creation in 1992 until 2016. The work identifies the authors, universities, and countries that publish the most in IBR by mainly using the Scopus database though eventually complemented with Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. It also analyzes the most cited papers and articles of the journal. Besides, the study graphically maps the bibliographic material by using the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer software. In order to do so, the work uses co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and co-occurrence of author keywords. The results show the prominent European profile of the journal where contributors from European universities and countries are the most productive ones in the journal. Particularly, British and Scandinavian universities obtain the most remarkable results. However, mostly scholars from North America, but also from Oceania and East Asia are increasingly and regularly publishing in the journal. In addition, IBR is very well connected to other leading journals in the field, such as the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) and the Journal of World Business (JWB), as well as with other top management journals, thus demonstrating its core position in IB research conducted worldwide.