Origin and emergence of entrepreneurship as a research field

This paper seeks to map out the emergence and evolution of entrepreneurship as an independent field in the social science literature from the early 1990s to 2009. Our analysis indicates that entrepreneurship has grown steadily during the 1990s but has truly emerged as a legitimate academic discipline in the latter part of the 2000s. The field has been dominated by researchers from Anglo-Saxon countries over the past 20 years, with particularly strong representations from the US, UK, and Canada. The results from our structural analysis, which is based on a core document approach, point to five large knowledge clusters and further 16 sub-clusters. We characterize the clusters from their cognitive structure and assess the strength of the relationships between these clusters. In addition, a list of most cited articles is presented and discussed.