The entrepreneurial marketing domain: a citation and co‐citation analysis

Entrepreneurial marketing (EM) is at the brink of becoming an established discipline. To advance the field further and to better guide research efforts in different sub categories, the purpose of this paper is to examine the field's intellectual structure with the help of citation and co‐citation analysis.

This paper is based on a two‐stage research design. First a citation analysis is carried out through which thematic clusters are identified. In a second step a co‐citation analysis is conducted to determine the intellectual structure of EM research.

This study exposes the most influential authors and publications and emphasizes conjunctions among scholars and their findings. Results show three streams that are the foundation of EM research: theoretical foundations of management, entrepreneurship, and marketing; the research interface of marketing and entrepreneurship; SME and new venture marketing.

The results of a bibliometric analysis are limited by the publications that have been selected as a starting point. However, through the selection criteria chosen to identify the database for analysis, the authors are confident that the results illustrate the intellectual structure of EM research in its entirety. The authors recommend that future research should be conducted in one of the three sub‐fields identified in this study.

By laying out different research streams within EM it is hoped that future research will be guided in different directions. “Fine‐tuning” of research efforts will benefit small, new, and entrepreneurial firms.

The analyses conducted in this paper draw a picture of the field that is based on a quantitative approach and therefore sets itself apart from other literature reviews that have a qualitative core.