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Exploring the research fronts and main paths of literature: a case study of shareholder activism research

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  • Vincent C. Ma

    (National Taiwan University of Science and Technology)

  • John S. Liu

    (National Taiwan University of Science and Technology)

Abstract

As a relatively young and vibrant discipline, shareholder activism has evolved to become a critical element of corporate governance research. While both finance and law scholars have revealed strong interest on shareholder activism, the heterogeneity in the research concentration of these two fields makes shareholder activism a fragmented discipline. We believe it would be interesting and insightful to conduct a citation-based analysis through the case study encompassing related articles on this topic published in both finance and law journals. We have adopted main path analysis to map out the evolution and research fronts of shareholder activism spanning over 30 years. The results indicated that shareholder activism research has developed in several stages: discussions on theoretical foundation, explorations on the “shareholder activism versus firm performance” correlation, the exceptions to the “one-share, one-vote” rule, the emergence of hedge fund activism research, and the recent “say-on-pay” campaigns. Edge-betweenness based clustering was used to categorize the citation network into coherent groups, with the most popular themes for the period 2003–2013 including “pressure and monitoring from institutional investors”, “shareholder activism in CSR and climate change”, “say-on-pay movement and board responsiveness”, and “shareholder voting and shareholder rights”. The trends are also discussed herein. This case study should contribute to future studies in both the practical and academic arenas.

Suggested Citation

  • Vincent C. Ma & John S. Liu, 2016. "Exploring the research fronts and main paths of literature: a case study of shareholder activism research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(1), pages 33-52, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:109:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-016-2035-x
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-016-2035-x
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