Trends in and contributions to entrepreneurship research: a broad review of literature from 1996 to June 2012

This article, which began as an effort to gauge trends in and contributions to the broad field of “entrepreneur/entrepreneurship,” reviews 5,476 academic articles on entrepreneurship that were published in 522 Social Sciences Citation Index and Science Citation Index journals from 1996 to June 2012. This survey identifies keywords and conducts a review to search for and identify related articles in the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database. We then present our findings, including the number of publications by year, categorization of article types, main academic journals, authors, and most-cited articles. The citation counts for authors, journals, and articles are also analyzed. This study indicates that the number of articles related to the keyword entrepreneur increased from 1996 to the end of 2011, which is a sign of an upward trend in the influence of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur research fascinated numerous scholars during the study period covering 16.5 years. In particular, researchers from the USA, England, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands have made the most contributions to this field. This literature review provides evidence that the concept of entrepreneur attracted academic researchers, resulting in significant contributions to the field of entrepreneur research.