Bibliometric analysis of articles on project management research

Abstract

Project management, as a subsidiary of social science, is a vast and varied topic of the area of knowledge. In the past decades, many studies have compiled an immense amount of information for theoreticians and practitioners in this field. In this paper, traditional and novel methods of bibliometric analysis are introduced through a survey for analyzing the history of research in project management. This study focuses on the last four decades of publications on project management, from 1980 to 2019. In the survey, the number of publications, the countries of publication, the cooperating relations among those countries, and the top categories of publications are analyzed. The extraction of publication keywords and the investigation of knowledge seeds are also presented. In the survey, the examination of the network of top occurring keywords, keyword clustering, together with the keyword correlation matrix, were used to explore the main trends in project management. A novel indicator, called the ICCO ranking, is presented by using the degree, betweenness and cluster coefficient of the network of keywords. Using this indicator, the potential knowledge seeds in project management may be identified.