Assessment of the history and trends of "The Journal of Intellectual Capital": a bibliometrics, altmetrics and text mining analysis

Purpose The Journal of Intellectual Capital (JIC) celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2020. Therefore, the present study aims to provide a general overview of the history and key trends in this journal during 2000-2019. Design/methodology/approach Two types of citation and textual data during a 20-year journal period were retrieved from the Scopus database. The citation structures and contents were explored based on a combination of bibliometric analysis, altmetric analysis and text mining. The journal themes and trends of their changes were analyzed through citation bursts, mapping and topic modeling. To make a better comparison, the text mining process for the topic modeling of the IC field was performed in addition to the topic modeling of JIC. Findings Bibliometric analysis indicated that JIC has experienced a remarkable growth in terms of the number of publications and citations over the last 20 years. The results indicated that JIC plays a significant role among IC researchers. Additionally, a large number of researchers, institutes and countries have made contributions to this journal and cited its research papers. Altmetric analysis showed that JIC has been shared in different social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Mendeley, Citeulike, news and blogs. Text mining abstract of JIC articles indicated that "measurement," "financial performance" and "IC reporting" have the relative prevalence with increasing trends over the past 20 years. In addition, "research trends" and "national and international studies" had a stable trend with low thematic share. Research limitations/implications The findings have important implications for the JIC editorial team in order to make informed decisions about the further development of JIC as well as for IC researchers and practitioners to make more valuable contributions to the journal. Originality/value Using bibliometric analysis, altmetric analysis and text mining, this study provided a systematic and comprehensive analysis of JIC. The simultaneous use of these methods provides an interesting, unique and suitable capacity to analyze the journals by considering their various aspects.