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Focus on China: the current status of entrepreneurship research in China

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Abstract

This review study is a first attempt to map the state of entrepreneurship research in China by focusing on the contributions of Chinese researchers. Leading contributors, research collaboration and theoretical underpinnings in both domestic-oriented and international-oriented research are discussed. The review comprises 508 articles published in domestic Chinese journals indexed by the Chinese Social Science Citation Index and 189 articles published in international journals indexed by the Social Science Citation Index between 2000 and 2011. Two bibliometric approaches, co-authorship analysis and co-citation analysis, were utilized. The results indicate that entrepreneurship research in China is characterized by a clear division, not only in terms of researchers in each community, collaborating network but also with regard to theoretical foundation. Domestic-oriented research is still in its infancy. The research community has attracted a majority of Chinese researchers who focus on inter-institutional collaboration based on mentorship and directing relationship. Scholars involved in international-oriented research engage in more open communication by collaborating not only with researchers from other Chinese institutions but also with those from foreign countries. At the same time, they contribute to the understanding of Chinese entrepreneurship by linking the entrepreneurship phenomenon in Chinese context to theoretical frameworks.

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Notes

  1. The Chinese words 创业* and 新创企业 mean ‘entrep*’, ‘start-up’/’startup’, ‘new firm*’ and ‘new venture*’.

  2. Wang Zhongming is a PhD supervisor in both Zhejiang University and Shanghai Jiaotong University.

  3. Cognitive structure can be examined in several ways, such as co-citation analysis and linguistic analysis. The authors also conducted a linguistic analysis based on abstracts, which reflects several differences in writing patterns. To fully address how linguistic structure impacts on cognitive development, a more detailed analysis of individual articles is required. Since the present study is mainly based on bibliometric data (such as authors, affiliations, references etc.), which focus on the current status of the entire field instead of the content of individual articles, only the results of the co-citation analysis will be discussed.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Hans Landström and the anonymous reviewer for providing insightful comments. This article also benefited from the comments made by participants in a seminar at the Sten K. Johnson Centre for Entrepreneurship at Lund University. The authors are also grateful to the financial support of Chinese Scholarship Committee and National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (10YJA630188), which made this article possible.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economic and Management, Tongji University, Room 309-2, No. 2 Building of Tongji Science Park, No. 65 Chifeng Road, Yangpu District, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Qinghua Zhai & Jing Su

  2. Sten K Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Qinghua Zhai & Jing Su

  3. School of Economic and Management, Tongji University, Yun Tong Building, No. 1239 Siping Road, Yangpu District, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Minghai Ye

Authors
  1. Qinghua Zhai
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  2. Jing Su
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  3. Minghai Ye
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jing Su.

Additional information

Qinghua Zhai, Jing Su and Minghai Ye have contributed equally to this study.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 6.

Table 6 List of source journals for domestic-oriented research
Full size table

Appendix 2

Information of the top 20 works in domestic and international-oriented research in alphabetical order

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Zhai, Q., Su, J. & Ye, M. Focus on China: the current status of entrepreneurship research in China. Scientometrics 98, 1985–2006 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1114-5

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