Strategic Alliances: Identifying Recent Emerging Areas of Research

Research on strategic alliances has increased rapidly since the 1990s, considering both journals and books. 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, considering more than 1500 publications and related 82,614 citations. Authors such as Dyer and Singh (1998), Gulati (1995; 1998), Hamel (1991), and Kogut (1988), Dyer (1997) Doz and Hamel (1998) Hamel, and Doz and Prahdal (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, the map of science can facilitate the understanding of the contemporaneous state of knowledge, as the first requirement of 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 paper.