Mapping the Intellectual Structure of Human Resource Management Studies: 1996-2005

Abstract

To map the intellectual structure of human resource management studies in the past decade, this study investigated the most important publications and the most influential scholars as well as the correlations among these documents by analyzing 33,132 citations of 1,267 articles published by SSCI journals in human resource management area between 1996 and 2005. This study further mapped the invisible network of knowledge of human resource management using co-citation analysis. Such a mapping can help identify the paradigm shift of human resource management research, and provide a valuable tool for researchers to access the literature in this area. INTRODUCTIONThe past decade has seen active research in human resource management and thus produced an impressive array of literature of human resource management. While research findings in human resource management can be disseminated to scientists and practitioners in the form of journal articles, papers, books, and other documents, scholars are easily confused with the research subjects and their contributions to the development of human resource management when faced with thousands of human resource management publications. Great efforts have been made to explore these issues, yet all the issues are usually discussed solely based on experts' subjective assessment, which often leads to many controversies in the study of human resource management area.To approach these issues in a more objective manner, a generic model of invisible network of knowledge (INK) is proposed in this paper which can be used to map the intellectual structure in the human resource management area. With citation and co-citation analysis this model is able to explore the intellectual structure of any existent field, delineate its knowledge network, and further portrait its knowledge diffusion process. The invisible network of knowledge (INK) model is defined in this paper as a set of interlinked invisible nodes, represented by different publications with their frequency of citations, and the correlations of these publications. Each set of such nodes serves a specific purpose for the study of human resource management or any other field of interest.Following Latour's study (1987), this study uses epistemological scientometrics to portray the invisible network of knowledge in human resource management in order to identify the intellectual architects (who), the contributions of these intellectual architects (what), and the time and place in which they published them (when and where) in human resource management area. The purpose of this study is to map the intellectual structure of human resource management studies for the past decade between 1996 and 2005 and to explore the paradigm shifts of the invisible network of knowledge generation in the field of human resource management (Kuhn, 1962;. The results of this study will also help those who want to independently study the related fields of human resource management.