A Bibliometric Analysis of Systematic Review Research in Business Model Scholarship

Purpose -

Business model research has gained traction in recent years, but its development appears stalled due to ongoing debates and conceptual ambiguity. Drawing on a corpus of over 350 journal articles, this paper presents a rigorous bibliometric analysis of the deployment of systematic review methodologies in business model research and identifies the prominent authors engaging with this method of research, their impact, and the key topics arising from these studies hitherto.

Design/methodology/approach -

The research methods are rooted in bibliometrics which consist of a set of systematic review methodologies that can be deployed to investigate the intellectual structure and evolution of research through statistical analysis of bibliographic data.

Findings -

The findings from the study reveal the nascent albeit recent increase in the deployment of systematic review methodologies in business model research. The prominent authors engaging with this method of research, their impact, and the key topics arising from these studies are also revealed.

Research limitations/implications -

As bibliometric analysis is retrospective, citations in the literature appear only after some time has elapsed. Therefore, different keyword selection when formulating search strings for sampling bibliographic data from the academic database may have brought some deviations to the analysis.

Originality/value -

This paper is among the first that analyzes objectively the deployment of systematic review methodologies in business model research by applying a rigorous bibliometric analysis from a longitudinal perspective, with a particular emphasis on the period between 2011 and 2024. A theoretically grounded framework to guide future inquiry is proposed and hence the paper also represents a call-to-action for business model researchers to continue to engage with rigorous systematic review methodologies to better understand the intellectual structure of existing bodies of work and hence identify gaps in knowledge that can be explored further.