Disciplinary Contributions to Nonprofit Studies: A 20-Year Empirical Mapping of Journals Publishing Nonprofit Research and Journal Citations by Nonprofit Scholars

Abstract

In celebration of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly’s 50th anniversary, we present a bibliometric analysis of nonprofit research published between 1999 and 2019, within and outside of three core nonprofit journals— NVSQ, NML, and Voluntas. We seek to understand which journals, across scientific domains and social science disciplines, inform nonprofit research in one of three ways, by (a) publishing articles, (b) citing the three core journals, or being cited in these core journals. We found that nonprofit research published in economics and social sciences journals has kept pace with a large increase in indexed research. Meanwhile, though the core nonprofit journals robustly cite and are increasingly cited by business and management and public administration journals, they are less engaged with other social science disciplines. We discuss ways that the core journals could increase their visibility and penetration into these other disciplines and highlight perspectives potentially missing from the core journals.

El modelo de empresa social y las entidades sin fines lucrativos: un análisis bibliométrico

“…Las tres primeras publicaciones han aparecido tradicionalmente en estudios bibliométricos centrados en ESFL (v.gr. Lu et al, 2019;LePere-Schloop, M., & Nesbit, 2022;Nordin et al, 2022). Con la excepción de las dos últimas publicaciones, el resto solamente publican trabajos sobre empresa social, en la medida en que existe mención al término nonprofit.…”

Consensus Formation in Nonprofit and Philanthropic Studies: Networks, Reputation, and Gender

“…Since even state-of-the-art computational methods cannot distinguish between contentious and concurring use of language, manually coding a selected number of topics is most promising for studying substantive consensus. (b) Examining the diversity of this interdisciplinary field and its relation to other disciplines (e.g., LePere-Schloop & Nesbit, 2022; Schubert et al, 2022). Either of these approaches can facilitate our understanding of the field’s intellectual growth and its institutionalization.…”

“…By applying advanced computational methods and utilizing bibliometrics, recent studies have mapped the connections between and the evolution of different research topics in this field (e.g., Jung et al, 2022; Kang et al, 2022; Ma & Konrath, 2018). Scholars have also mapped the relations between nonprofit studies and other fields of research, recommending more knowledge integration between different research fields (LePere-Schloop & Nesbit, 2022). In this article, we analyze the degree to which nonprofit researchers have consensus in the form of shared language.…”

NVSQ: The First Fifty Years, and Beyond

“…The concern of the dominance of scholars from public management and geographic concentration of scholarship is not confined to an older generation but is also expressed by emerging scholars, as noted in the article by Schubert et al in this special issue. LePere-Schloop and Nesbit (this issue) point to a broader problem: “while nonprofit studies is increasingly multidisciplinary, it is not yet very interdisciplinary ; the knowledge it produces does not yet penetrate or influence other disciplines to a significant extent.” Despite an increase in volume in nonprofit research overall, only a few disciplines—mainly business and management—have “robust back-and-forth conversations” as measured by cross-citations in the journals. In addition, the field is not growing quickly enough to increase the size of its footprint, as indicated by its percentage of articles, in other disciplines.…”