Mapping the Last Five Decades of Entrepreneurship History Research: A Web of Science Analysis

This study provides a bibliometric overview of the last fifty years of entrepreneurship history, focusing on the Web of Science, a leading scholarly database. Its primary objective is to delineate the field’s structure and uncover its social, intellectual, and conceptual foundations. A total of 1,912 publications from 1980 to the present were analyzed using VOSviewer and the R Bibliometrix package. The study employed co-authorship, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, keyword, and thematic evolution analyses. Findings reveal that the field is dominated by SSCI-indexed journal articles, with Business History contributing most prominently. The year 2020 marks the peak of research productivity, and the literature has grown at an average annual rate of 5%. Core keywords include entrepreneurship, history, and entrepreneurialism, while recent research shows increasing attention to social entrepreneurship and Italy. Thematic evolution demonstrates a shift from foundational concepts such as management and models, through education and identity, to entrepreneurship and performance, and most recently toward innovation and gender. Overall, the study highlights the field’s maturity, the centrality of foundational concepts, and the dynamic evolution of research themes, providing a comprehensive roadmap for future scholarship in entrepreneurship history. JEL Classification: L26, M13, N80, B30