Women Entrepreneurship: A Bibliometric Analysis and Paths for Future Research

Abstract

This paper aims to present the evolution of research publications on women entrepreneurship within 10 years (2012 to 2021) through a bibliometric analysis. This study examined 314 articles on women entrepreneurship from the Scopus database. The evaluation of the performance of publication was analysed using Harzing’s platform, while the mapping of the bibliometric network was visualized using VOSviewer. The results show a significant growth in the number of publications and citations in the research domain across the 10-year study period, with five dominant themes of women entrepreneurship derived from the network visualisation analysis. This paper focused exclusively on the bibliometric analysis of the publications obtained from a single source (i.e. Scopus), thus might not attain rich datasets as compared to a combination use of multiple databases. Nonetheless, this study contributes as a point of reference on the extant and emergent topics and methodology decisions for future studies on women entrepreneurship. The analysis revealed that women entrepreneurship is a multidisciplinary field of research with new and emerging research themes, i.e. women entrepreneurs and innovation, which makes it become a current and valid object of study towards a more sustainable future. This study proposes a research framework for women entrepreneurship based on an integrated perspective explaining women entrepreneurship from the liberal feminist theory, resource-based view and the proposed research clusters derived from the network visualisation analysis.