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Research on political instability, uncertainty and risk during 1953–2019: a scientometric review

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Abstract

We are now living in an integrated world full of abrupt political events and socio-political uncertainty. A comprehensive scientometric review in this aspect is useful but lacked in the existing literature. This paper fills the void by using VOSviewer and CiteSpace to systematically analyze the 4200 papers on “political instability”, “political uncertainty” and “political risk” during 1953–2019 from Web of Science Core Collection. We present the annual distribution of papers, the related disciplines, the mainstream journals, hot topics, references with the strongest citation bursts, recent publications with transformative potentials, as well as the collaboration networks of authors, organizations and countries. The hot spots include (1) the causes and impact of political instability, (2) the relationship among political uncertainty, energy price and macroeconomic/financial factors, and (3) the determinants of foreign direct investments. Rangan Gupta from University of Pretoria in South Africa has the most publications in this field, while Witold J Henisz from University of Pennsylvania in the USA has the most citations. As the first endeavor to do comparative study of easily confused terminologies with bibliometric analysis, we find that though literature on “political instability” and “political risk” appeared earlier and have larger volume, research on “political uncertainty” is currently more active and catching up fast. Keywords with on-going citation bursts, two thirds of active co-citation clusters, and potentially transformative papers published recently are all related to political/policy uncertainty. The three strands of literature have obvious overlap and meanwhile their own special foci.

Graphic abstract

Main areas of research on political instability, political uncertainty and political risk

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Abbreviations

FDI:

Foreign direct investment

EPU:

Economic policy uncertainty

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Acknowledgements

We greatly appreciate the valuable comments of the anonymous referee. This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 21776120).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, KU Leuven, 3001, Leuven, Belgium

    Yingting Yi & Michael Wübbenhorst

  2. College of Materials Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China

    Jiangshui Luo

Authors
  1. Yingting Yi
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  2. Jiangshui Luo
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  3. Michael Wübbenhorst
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data collection and analysis were performed by YY. The first draft of the manuscript was written by YY and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jiangshui Luo or Michael Wübbenhorst.

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Yi, Y., Luo, J. & Wübbenhorst, M. Research on political instability, uncertainty and risk during 1953–2019: a scientometric review. Scientometrics 123, 1051–1076 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03416-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03416-6

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