Entrepreneurship and SMEs: A Bibliometric Analysis Amidst COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

Purpose: The remarkable concept of entrepreneurship has attracted scholars’ attention for its relevance to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Entrepreneurship and SMEs (E&SMEs) have been globally acknowledged as instruments for achieving economic growth and development as well as employment creation. 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 entrepreneurship and SMEs, identifying the most prominent journals, country contributions, top-cited authors and articles in this field, as well, reporting the standard bibliometric indicators such as the growth of publications, authorship patterns, collaboration, and prolific authors. Design/Methodology/Approach: The paper uses the data from Scopus online database as of June 2022. Based on ‘key-terms’ search results, 287 valid documents were obtained for further analysis using VOS viewer software and Harzing’s Publish or Perish for citation metrics and analysis. Findings: Sustainability (Switzerland) Journal and Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies are the most relevant journals in the field. Among many authors, concerning the frequency of citations, Fairlie’s (2020) article emerges as the most cited article with 85 cites and an average of 42.5 citations per year, followed by Brown and Rocha’s (2020) article emerges 80 cites and an average of 40 citations per year. The United States ranked as the most contributor country in productivity with 29 (10.10%) published documents. Originality/Value: This paper contributes to entrepreneurship and SMEs amidst COVID-19 crisis research by providing a global perspective on the concept’s investigation using bibliometric data and graphical networks.