On the 50-Year Research Landscape of Entrepreneurial Finance: A Sign of Western Ideological Homogeneity?

Abstract

Financing issues play essential roles in the survival and development of entrepreneurial firms. The current study, employing the bibliometric analysis of 6,903 articles from 1970 to 2019, extracted from Web of Science database, aims to provide an overview of the discipline’s landscape and major scientific domains to facilitate scientific development within the field. Entrepreneurial finance is a young and growing field with exponential growth in the number of publications (with 19.54% per year) and rising collaboration tendency among authors. Journal of Business Venturing is the most prestigious journal, while Sustainability is noteworthy for its rapid contribution to the field. We also note a sign of Western ideological homogeneity from the collaboration networks and lists of top authors, institutions, and countries. Besides, using keyword co-occurrence analysis, seven major research domains are identified: “venture capital”, “crowdfunding”, “SMEs finance”, “social entrepreneurship finance”, “financial risk”, “microfinance”, and “human-social-financial capital”. Based on these findings, we raise the concern of lacking diversity in entrepreneurial finance research and provide several recommendations for future potential research directions.

Keywords: entrepreneurial finance; bibliometrics; Western; ideological homogeneity; crowdfunding; microfinance; social entrepreneurship