A systematic retrieval of international competitiveness literature: a bibliometric study

Abstract

Over the last three decades there has been growing interest in international competitiveness research. However, as evidenced by the academic literature, there is a lack of systematic chronological studies synthesizing how this field has evolved over time. The main aim of this paper is to consolidate the state of the art of academic research on international competitiveness in the discipline of economics by using a new method: a bibliometric study of the economics literature published over the past 70 years. Citation data is collected from Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar, and it is analysed using HistCite, Pajek and VOSviewer software. Using bibliometric indicators, network citation analysis, key-routes main path methodology and term co-occurrence analysis, it investigates the growth pattern of the international competitiveness literature, identifies the core journals and authors, the main paths of knowledge diffusion and the key research domains in the international competitiveness literature. The results of the analysis show that studies on international competitiveness have been and still are important and popular in economics. International competitiveness concepts come from models of competition and are not strongly connected with classical theories of international trade. Publications by Krugman, Fagerber and Balassa have made the greatest contributions to the development of international competitiveness studies, but only Krugman's works have been significant in terms of knowledge diffusion. International competitiveness mostly refers to international trade/export performance and to the impacts of cost, price, exchange rates, income and FDI. However, in the last decade the relationships between trade flows and technology, liberalization processes, environmental regulations, location, education/human capital and productivity have become key topics in international competitiveness studies.

A Bibliometric Analysis of the Top Five Economics Journals During 2012–2016

“…Bibliometrics has been applied to some economics research (e.g. Bonilla et al ., ; Hernandez‐Villafuerte et al ., ; Hodgson and Lamberg, ; Olczyk, ). This study inspires more research on the combination of economics and bibliometrics.…”

Public Sector Reform from the Post-New Public Management Perspective: Review and Bibliometric Analysis

“…Based on the recommendation of Griffith et al (1974), we selected the 100 most-cited publications and aimed towards the visual presentation of the relations among these publications associated with the development of the PGM field. This was achieved with a historiograph (Figure 3), where the vertical axis represents time, the hori-zontal axis shows citation network nodes and arrows show the relationship between the cited publications (Olczyk, 2016). This allowed for a comprehensive numerical and graphical presentation of the evolution of the PGM literature, as reflected by the identified main authors, journals, publications, and relations among the latter.…”

“…The method has great value, es-pecially when using citation analysis to quantitatively assess the core journal titles and watershed publications in particular disciplines; interrelationships between authors from different institutions and schools of thought; and related data about the sociology of academia. This may be achieved through three main groups of bibliometric methods (Archambault and Gagne, 2004;Olczyk, 2016). The first method involves counting numbers of publications in journals during a specific time frame.…”

“…Finally (RQ3), the question of the relations between the most frequently cited documents is going to be addressed. Consequently, we are going to present the main academic trajectory, highlighting the structural backbone (Nooy et al, 2005;Lucio-Arias and Leydesdorff, 2008;Olczyk, 2016) in the development of the PGM field. Moreover, based on addressing these questions, it will be possible to provide specific guidelines for further PGM research, taking into consideration the national legacies of respective countries.…”

International Competitiveness and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

“…Contemporary competitiveness theories are built upon the works of Dixit and Stiglitz (1977) and Krugman (1979bKrugman ( , 1980) (see Olczyk, 2016 for a review). Dixit and Stiglitz (1977) model imperfect competition with highly differentiated products and downward-sloping demand curves.…”