A Bibliometric Analysis of Social Entrepreneurship Research: Trends, Patterns, and Future Directions

This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of social entrepreneurship academic literature from 1965 to 2024, using VOSviewer to understand and visualise publication trends and keyword co-occurrence patterns. The dataset, retrieved from Scopus, consists of 8,485 documents, categorised into academic articles, books, book chapters, and conference proceedings. The analysis focuses on identifying frequently used keywords, exploring their connections, and observing the development of key topics in the academic social entrepreneurship literature. Through co-occurrence analysis, this study visualises relationships between key concepts and shows trends. By examining the frequency and clusters of keywords, the study may provide a broader and deeper explanation of how the academic literature on social entrepreneurship research has evolved. The analysis of publication trends also shows how interest in social entrepreneurship has grown and how research focus and themes have changed over time. As Result, it can be said that social entrepreneurship as an academic field emerged in the early 2000s. Thus, from 1965 to 2010, research on social entrepreneurship mainly focused on defining key concepts and distinguishing the field from traditional- profit seeking entrepreneurship. In the years between 2011 and 2015, scholars began to explore social enterprises, social entrepreneurs, applications, systems, and their interactions. Between 2016 and 2020, the literature expanded to research interdisciplinary topics such as entrepreneurship education, gender(s), and hybrid organisations. In recent years, from 2021 to 2024, the focus of the social entrepreneurship literature has shifted towards themes like digitalisation, psychological motivations of social entrepreneurs and how they responded in times of crisis.