The intellectual structure of human resource management research: a bibliometric study of the international journal of human resource management, 2000–2012

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the existing literature on human resource management (HRM) from all the research papers published in The International Journal of Human Resource Management between 2000 and 2012. The authors apply bibliometric methods to identify the main research lines within this scientific field; in other words, its ‘intellectual structure’. Social network analysis is also used to perform a visualization of this structure. The results of the analysis allow us to define the different research lines or fronts which shape the intellectual structure of research on HRM.

Keywords:

• Human resource management
• bibliometrics
• citation analysis
• author co-citation analysis (ACA)
• social networks analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This group includes works applied to the widest variety of scientific domains: economy, psychology, sociology, management, communication, marketing, medicine, geography... In the specific case of management, these methods have been implemented in, to quote but a few, strategic management (Acedo, Barroso, & Galan, 2006; Di Stefano, Peteraf, & Verona, 2010; Nerur, Rasheed, & Natarajan, 2008; Peteraf, Di Stefano, & Verona, 2013; Ramos-Rodríguez & Ruíz-Navarro, 2004; Ronda-Pupo & Guerras-Martin, 2012), entrepreneurship (Gartner, Davidsson, & Zahra, 2006; Landström, Harirchi, & Åström, 2012; Schildt, Zahra, & Sillanpaa, 2006), international business (Acedo & Casillas, 2005; Kraus, 2011), hospitality management (García-Lillo, Úbeda-García, & Marco-Lajara, 2016), innovation (Fagerberg, Fosaas, & Sapprasert, 2012; Fagerberg & Verspagen, 2009), business ethics (Calabretta, Durisin, & Ogliengo, 2011; Ma, 2009; Uysal, 2010), family business (Benavides-Velasco, Quintana-García, & Guzmán-Parra, 2013; Casillas & Acedo, 2007), strategic alliances (Di Guardo & Harrigan, 2012) supply chain management (Charvet, Cooper, & Gardner, 2008), corporate governance (Durisin & Puzone, 2009) and operation management (Pilkington & Meredith, 2009).

2. On the whole, what the literature actually suggests is that no methodological guide has been established in this sense, which is why the choice tends to result from a number of tests so that a co-citation matrix can be obtained with a size suited to its statistical treatment or its graphic representation. The same line of reasoning is expressed in relation to the outsourcing field by authors such as Schildt et al. (2006, p. 401). Nevertheless, in the paper by Rodríguez and Ruiz-Navarro (2004), the determination of the number of documents to be analyzed is carried out according to the ‘stress’ values obtained from the application of multidimensional scaling (MDS), so that such values are situated below a specific value and can be regarded as indicative of a good (or adequate) fit. This same approach was adopted by Pilkington and Meredith (2009), obtaining a stress value of 0.174 applying PROXSCAL to its proximity matrix (Euclidean distances calculated using Gower’s classical metric ordination procedure in UCINET 6) with a 197 × 197 size. In our case, the application of PROXSCAL to the distance matrix calculated through the implementation of this procedure to our data offers a stress value of 0.0816, which can be considered ‘acceptable’ – since it is situated below 0.10, the advisable minimum.