Positioning the literature of the business model: a bibliometric analysis

Today, the business model (BM) is one of the most studied concepts within managerial and innovation literature. Although scholars have shown a growing interest in understanding and analyzing the BM, a theoretical conceptualization is still lacking. This article uses document bibliometric analyses (both co-citation and bibliographic coupling) to objectively explore the underlying structure of the BM research domain. The paper provides a systematic review of the current state of BM research by mapping the research landscape to identify key research clusters, publications, and journals that have relevance to the BM topic. Using the ISI Web of Knowledge “Core collection”, this study conducts a document bibliometric analysis of 3,604 publications between 1985 and 2017 in the fields of management and business. The mix of quantitative methods and a systematic review allows this research to overcome the barriers of subjective literature reviews by integrating a large set of publications and leveraging the insights of the wider scientific community. Co-citation analysis results have identified five major research clusters that characterize the intellectual BM foundations, and bibliographic coupling findings have captured seven main emergent sub-fields of literature.