Mapping research on competitive strategy in international business journals: a co-citation analysis

The competitive strategy (CS) literature in international business (IB) journals in the last two decades has constituted a considerable database. But few studies have adopted bibliometric methods to map a comprehensive overview of these publications. Thus, a quantitative bibliometric review summarising and integrating what we know to identify and suggest future directions for researchers is necessary. Information on 1,099 articles was obtained from the Web of Science. CiteSpace was used to perform a comprehensive bibliometric analysis. By document co-citation analysis, three main emerging research trends, which are the expansion of emerging market multinational enterprises, a mediator linking resources and the international performance, and the political dimension of intra-firm competition, were identified. We also detected the core authors, institutions, countries/regions, and cited journals to present the quantitative overview of the active researchers and their affiliations for promoting academic collaboration of future research. It can support researchers by offering a quantitative overview of the evolution and current status of CS research in IB environments and be helpful for researchers to efficiently identify the research network and to promote a deeper understanding of the CS research status in IB environments.