The 2020 bibliography of IE articles includes papers found in:
- IE-friendly journals (n = 29) with impact factor > 1.0; and
- the Journal of International Entrepreneurship (the only journal devoted to IE).
Editorials/introductions to special issues were excluded and core exclusion criteria were as follows:
- Studies focused on SME internationalization rather than IE per se, i.e. where entrepreneurship issues and theories are not integrated or addressed in the study;
- Studies in which the primary focus is not international entrepreneurship. E.g. studies of biotech firms in global industries or in which the focus is on technological innovation rather than business or entrepreneurial processes;
- Studies focused on domestic entrepreneurship in one country;
- Cross-cultural assessments of (e.g.) EO measures that focus on scale and measure development or validation;
- Studies on transnational and/or immigrant entrepreneurship.
The list, which can be found under Research is in Excel format, allowing you to search by keyword, date, author, or journal. The article titles contain a hyperlink leading to the article abstract.
Patterns?
- We see a slight decline in the number of IE articles published in 2020 (82 in total) from 100 articles published in 2019 and 57 articles in 2018.
- Of these 82, thirteen (16%) were from the elite group of our IE-friendly journals: JIBS (3), JBV (2), ETP (1) and JWB(7).
- Besides JIEN, the only journal devoted to IE, IBR and JBR published the most IE articles (13 and 10 articles, respectively).
- The other journals with a high number of IE publications include IJEBR (7 articles), ISBJ (6 articles) and IMR (5 articles).
- Among the published articles, there were 5 IE-related literature reviews
- New themes: 7 articles related to digitization, 5 articles related to international social entrepreneurship
What does this mean?
It is exciting to see that IE remains a field that is of interest to highly impactful journals. It is also heartening to see that research productivity of IE scholars remained high despite the unusual circumstances brought about by the COVID-19 crisis. The number of literature review papers indicates that as a field, IE appears to be maturing. We still see quite a few papers exploring the “traditional” IE concepts such as internationalization speed, born global ventures, networks and advantages of newness. Likewise, comparative studies of entrepreneurship remain relatively common. However, we also see studies exploring relatively new topics from the IE angle. These include digitization and social entrepreneurship.
NOTE – Many, many thanks to IE Ambassadors Sreevas Sahasranaman, Meena Chavan, Marleen McCormick Pritchard, Sinea Monaghan, Andreu Blesa, Imtiaz Mostafiz, Lasse Torkkeli and Novika Casandra Astuti for their contribution in compiling the list.