Eight tips and questions for your bibliographic study in business and management research
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Abstract
in systematic literature reviews, meta analyses, replication studies, and bibliographic studies.Previous editorials published in MRQ provide authors with guidelines for performing systematic (narrative) literature reviews (Fisch and Block 2018) and replication studies (Block and Kuckertz 2018).In this editorial, we focus on bibliographic studies and outline eight tips that help authors to improve their bibliographic studies.In contrast to systematic literature reviews, meta analyses, and replication studies, little information on best practices and guidelines exist on bibliographic studies (also known as bibliographic literature reviews).Over the last years, we saw a steady increase in the number of bibliographic studies submitted to MRQ.We attribute this rise to the better accessibility of bibliographic data and software packages that specialize in bibliographic analyses.Another antecedent of the increasing prevalence of bibliographic studies is the ongoing differentiation of business and management research into narrowly defined subdisciplines, which calls for studies that are interdisciplinary and 'break the walls'.Well-conducted bibliographic studies can break those walls.They structure a field and detect links between disciplines, identify topic clusters, literature gaps and academic silos, and show the most impactful authors and their research.Yet, in contrast to narrative literature reviews, bibliographic literature reviews use quantitative and statistical methods to achieve this goal.We currently observe a considerable heterogeneity in the type and quality of bibliographic studies submitted to MRQ.