Strategic Alliances: Identifying Recent Emerging Sub-Fields of Research

Research in both journals and books on strategic alliances has increased rapidly since the 1990s. Numerous related topics have been explored, such as globalisation, governance structure, learning capability, and alliance stability. The founding fathers of this literature were analysed by Ling and Chen (2012) in their bibliometric survey, which covered more than 1500 publications and 82,614 citations. Dyer and Singh (1998), Gulati (1995; 1998), Hamel (1991), Kogut (1988), Dyer (1997), Doz and Hamel (1998), and Hamel, Doz and Prahalad (1989) emerged as the most cited authors. By using the bibliometric technique, it is possible to create a map of science in a specific field or discipline. In the scientific literature, mapping of science can facilitate an understanding of the contemporaneous state of knowledge as the first requirement for a good history of science, facilitating the understanding of conceptual relations. While the analyses of citations and co-citations refer to influential articles of the past, they do not represent the core subfield of contemporary research that is, indeed, the main aim of the bibliographic coupling analysis used in this chapter.