Complementing prior quantitative and qualitative reviews of the leadership literature, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of leadership articles. Our bibliometric review provides a different perspective by portraying the landscape and developmental trajectory of leadership research over time via co-citation and co-occurrence analyses. Using a scientific visualization tool CiteSpace and 6528 leadership works collected from the Web of Science database from 1990 to 2017, we detect and visualize the landscape of leadership research and track how this landscape has evolved. After mapping the landscape, we discuss the insights gleaned from our bibliometric review, with a focus on open questions, future research directions, and implications. In doing so, our review provides readers with a systematic understanding of the development of the leadership field and a roadmap to spark leadership research and move this literature forward.
Citation:
The Leadership Quarterly Volume 30, Issue 2, April 2019, Pages 215-232