International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-022-00798-2

Female entrepreneurial leadership factors

Sofia Aparisi-Torrijo1 · Gabriela Ribes-Giner1

Accepted: 16 March 2022 / Published online: 3 August 2022

© The Author(s) 2022

Abstract
This article presents the foundations, current structure and trend of academic re-
search into leadership factors in female entrepreneurship to provide scholars in the
field with an overview of the followed research directions and to explore whether
the same traditional patterns are reproduced in gender studies on entrepreneurship
and leadership. For this purpose, a bibliometric analysis of the Web of Science
database from 2000 to 2020 was used. With a performance analysis of variables
(e.g. authors, publications, journals and countries), and thanks to scientific map-
ping, the links among these variables were studied. The results show that the trend
of publications increased from 2015, but with little influence and output. The most
influential and productive countries are the USA and Spain. 35% of the journals
are based in the USA and 25% in England. The most influential ones deal with
entrepreneurship, business, management and leadership. Although the foundational
base is influenced by the author Ahl, known for calling for new research directions
related to women entrepreneurs from a social construction perspective, the most
influential articles continue to investigate gender with a dominant male bias. The
network analysis reveals cooperation between different countries and authors with
the USA dominating. The ambiguity of entrepreneurial leadership field due to the
overlap of entrepreneurship and leadership disciplines reveals through the co-cita-
tion of journals different specialisation areas: business and entrepreneurship, man-
agement and psychology, organisational behaviour. This work provides researchers
with an overview that encourages them to overcome the dominant male normative
lens from new epistemological perspectives.

Keywords Female Entrepreneurial Leadership · Bibliometric analysis · Gender ·

Entrepreneurial leadership factors

Sofia Aparisi-Torrijo
[email protected]

1
Business Management department, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

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1708 International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737

Introduction

Research into female entrepreneurship (FE) has developed significantly in recent

decades. Several arguments are used to justify the territory chosen to legitimise
research in this field (Ahl, 2003). The vast majority of scholars do so from a tradi-
tional market perspective by citing its high impact on economic growth (Ahl, 2004;
Calás et al., 2009), but others do so to search for equality (Ahl, 2003), through its
impact as a social process of change (Calás et al., 2009). What is certain is that FE
deserves to be studied in its own right (Bruin et al., 2006). However, some feminist
researchers warn about the importance of the chosen epistemological positioning
by challenging and questioning the very basis of followed practices by obtaining
very different results depending on the research approach and lenses employed (Ahl,
2006; Calás et al., 2009).
Traditional research has often considered the entrepreneur to be “generic”, and
only differentiated from non-entrepreneurs. Hence it is not considered necessary to
research women specifically because they have similar characteristics (Bruin et al.,
2006). Other assumptions have focused on gender as a variable (Carter & Shaw,
2006), with a large number of studies that primarily compare male and female
entrepreneurs. Although these last studies have advanced the FE field by “improv-
ing understanding and highlighting the contribution of women-led businesses to the
global economy” (Henry et al., 2015), they have generated a persistent, but hidden,
gender bias in entrepreneurial discourse with a dominant male model, where stereo-
types with masculine characteristics have prevailed (Ahl, 2004; Antunes et al., 2020).
Consequently, women are positioned as lacking and incomplete men, and their busi-
nesses are considered to be less important (Ahl, 2006). Overall, contemporary schol-
ars now recognise the unconscious tendency of some accepted research approaches
to contribute to the highly biased perception of women entrepreneurs as inferior to
their male peers (Ahl, 2006) by, thus, reinforcing and replicating the subordination
of the feminine to the masculine (Marlow & Patton, 2005). Despite calls to employ
feminist theory as an analytical framework to demonstrate this inferiority bias, “there
is little evidence that this has emerged”. So research remains descriptive rather than
explanator (Ahl & Marlow, 2012).
Research into women’s leadership has followed the same patterns. The leadership
literature studies different leadership styles and approaches in an attempt to identify
distinct skills that contribute to leadership effectiveness, but still reflects the same
“gendered paradigm” (Galloway et al., 2015). The “symbolic universe of masculin-
ity” (Patterson et al., 2012) has so substantially shaped leadership development that
leadership can hardly be separated from men (Eagly & Carli, 2003). Understandings
of organisations, leaders and individual roles are based on gendered expectations
(Patterson et al., 2012) in which we find masculinity and men as normative referents
(Calás & Smircich 1996), women develop as leaders in a masculine context (Elliott &
Stead, 2008) and it is a challenge to assert their authenticity (Galloway et al., 2015).
Once again, these assumptions situated in Western industrial contexts that reproduce
these ‘masculine ideals’ condition the research focus that impacts leadership practice
(Elliott & Stead, 2008).

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International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737 1709

Some researchers have sought to move the focus of women’s research forward by
taking it out of “its dead end” and proposing new directions (Ahl & Marlow, 2012).
They recommend feminist theorising that “challenges the highly gendered nature of
entrepreneurship studies” Ahl, 2006; Harrison et al., 2015; Henry, Foss, Fayolle, et
al., 2015), and also leadership by promoting a shift from a male experience-based
approach to a more interpretive poststructuralist methodology with women’s experi-
ences (Calás et al., 2009). It is important to make progress in gender studies to under-
stand how gender is constructed by moving from having “a descriptive approach with
no theoretical orientation to an approach with highly informed conceptual frame-
works” (Henry et al., 2015).
And despite all the progress in entrepreneurial research and gendered leadership,
the “new paradigm” of entrepreneurial leadership (EL) (Fernald et al., 2005) has
not benefited from these wider debates and developments. The literature in this field
“has not been accompanied by appropriate theoretical frameworks, theory building
and conceptual analysis, including gender analysis” (Harrison et al., 2015). EL dis-
course tends to move towards subordination by “rendering essentially invisible the
gendered and sexual dimensions of much contemporary leadership practice” (Henry,
Foss, Fayolle, et al., 2015; ).
The EL field is a relatively recently recognised research area with its own identity,
and one that has emerged from studying the convergence of the entrepreneurship and
leadership fields. This ‘new paradigm’ benefits from the mutual cross-fertilisation
between the two areas, and its contribution is recognised as a factor in the success or
failure of small- and medium-sized enterprises Harrison et al., 2018; Leitch & Har-
rison, 2018; Leitch et al., 2013; Renko et al., 2015; Simba & Thai 2019) and large
companies (Kuratko, 2007). For entrepreneurial activities to be successful, the leader
needs certain competencies or attributes, defined as specific leadership capabilities
(Cogliser & Brigham, 2004; Fernald et al., 2005; Gupta et al., 2004). Although this
field continues to evolve, its definition is not clear (Leitch & Harrison, 2018). None-
theless, the definition proposed by Gupta et al., (2004) as a “leadership that creates
visionary scenarios that are used to assemble and mobilize a ‘supporting cast’ of
participants who become committed by the vision to the discovery and exploitation
of strategic value creation’’ (Gupta et al., 2004) is generally accepted. A common
thread to most definitions is that it is clearly grounded in the entrepreneurial literature
by focusing on the traits, characteristics and behaviours of entrepreneurial leaders
and leadership (Harrison et al., 2015). To advance with its definition and concept, it
is important to identify and better understand which factors, attributes, skills, abili-
ties, capabilities, characteristics or behaviours are considered the most valuable for
entrepreneurs to overcome the challenges of managing an organisation. From a con-
ceptual overlap approach between leadership and entrepreneurship (Roomi & Har-
rison, 2011), factors such as vision, influence, leadership of innovative and creative
people, and planning (Cogliser & Brigham, 2004) stand out. From the perspective
of personality traits and attributes or holistic vision, we find factors like achieve-
ment orientation, flexibility, passion, perseverance, overconfidence, stress resistance,
assertiveness, competitiveness, opportunity detection, risk aversion, among others
(Fernald et al., 2005; Harrison & Burnard, 2016; Nicholson, 1998; Renko et al.,
2015; Vecchio, 2003).

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However, information on how these attributes have been able to help entrepreneurs
to overcome challenges, whether they can be learned or exercised, and whether a gen-
der prism has been identified, is insufficient to date (Harrison et al., 2018; Kempster
& Cope, 2010). Adequate tools to measure leaders’ entrepreneurial characteristics
and behaviours are lacking (Renko et al., 2015) and no consensus has been reached
(Harrison & Burnard, 2016). As several researchers state, the field is still searching
for its identity (Leitch & Harrison, 2018; Leitch et al., 2013; Renko et al., 2015).
Exploring gender in the EL context allows us to look at the discipline from new
and different perspectives by better recognising women’s EL experiences (Carter
& Marlow y Bennett, 2012). To do this, we must move away from the entrenched
approach that views EL as gender-blind, gender-neutral and gender-defensive (Pat-
terson et al., 2012).
It is important to understand the starting point and approach taken by research-
ers of the emerging niche of factors in female EL (FEL) by avoiding reproducing
the same gender bias errors that traditional entrepreneurship and leadership research
reproduced. The purpose of this research is to understand the landscape of the founda-
tional and structural basis of FEL factors and their trend. To do so, we apply the bib-
liometric method to the literature in this field to understand the trend of publications
in productivity and influence terms. The following questions are answered: which
articles are the most cited and constitute the intellectual base, which authors study
this subject, which researcher groups have been formed and from which research
approaches, what type of journals publish and from which countries, and in which
major knowledge areas is this field being catalogued. Possible lenses and prisms
through which this research is conducted are sought. The bibliometric methodology
is applied with two approaches: a scientific performance analysis and graphically
mapping the field (Cobo et al. 2011, Gaviria-Marín 2021). The former aims to assess
the impact of the production and citations made to the scientific output of a specific
study field for certain variables, such as authors, universities, articles, countries and
journals. The latter includes the graphical mapping of science to show the structural
and dynamic aspects of scientific research. They are often studied as a combination
to validate and enrich the results of both. Therefore, the complementarity of both
approaches allows a global picture to be built of a specific research field and its evo-
lution by identifying areas of current interest to be employed within theoretical and
empirical frameworks. Bibliometric studies are often used in a wide range of social
science research fields, such as management (Podsakoff et al., 2008), entrepreneur-
ship (Luor et al., 2014) and innovation (Cancino et al., 2017).
The structure of this article is as follows. Firstly, the bibliometric methods applied
and the search methodology to obtain the database are discussed. The next section
presents the results: a survey of publications, authors, countries, journals and research
areas and keywords together with a detailed graphical analysis of the bibliographic
data networks using VOSviewer software. To conclude, the main conclusions of the
study and its limitations are addressed, identifying possible future research.

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Bibliometric Method

In this study, a bibliometric analysis is used to assess where the most active influen-
tial research focus on this topic lies. Bibliometric methods are recognised as scien-
tific specialties, form an integral part of the research evaluation and quantification
methodology, especially in scientific and applied fields (Ellegaard & Wallin, 2015),
and are increasingly employed to study various aspects of science (Hood & Wilson,
2001) like the business and management field (Gaviria-Marín, 2021). To obtain an
overview of the studied field, different procedures can be applied, such as a scien-
tific performance analysis or the graphical mapping of science (Gaviria-Marín, 2021;
Merigó et al., 2015).
To carry out a bibliometric performance analysis, indicators are used to measure
academic production or its influence (Cancino et al., 2017; Merigó & Yang, 2017)
based on a content or citation analysis by data collection and management (Wallin,
2005; Martínez et al., 2014). The results are about the total number of papers pub-
lished during a given time period (TP), the impact of these publications (TC), the
average number of citations per article (TC/TP), the most relevant authors, the most
representative journals (Thongpapanl, 2012), an author’s h-index (Hirsch, 2005;
Alonso et al., 2009), the journal’s impact factor (IF) (Garfield, 1972) and data on the
geographical distribution of publications like country of origin (Bonilla et al., 2015).
One of the main bibliometric indices to evaluate researchers’ scientific performance
(Alonso et al., 2009) is the h-index, which was introduced (Hirsch, 2005) to consider
the quantity and impact of their publications. It is also used to measure different
actors’ scientific performance (Alonso et al., 2009), such as journals (Braun et al.,
2006), countries (Guan & Gao, 2008), institutes or universities (Schubert, 2007).
The second approach provides a network analysis with graphical maps based on
bibliographic data. The VOSviewer software (version 1.6.15 (0)) (Van Eck & Walt-
man, 2010) was used to create and visualise them. VOSviewer is a free software that
allows information to be graphically represented and analysed, such as citation analy-
ses, co-citations of journals, bibliographic coupling by authors and countries, and co-
occurrence of author keywords (Boyack & Klavans, 2010; Merigó et al., 2018; Zupic
& Čater, 2015). It also visualises the connections between these variables (Merigó
et al., 2016). These techniques, when combined with a network analysis, allow the
bibliometric structure and intellectual structure of the research field to be presented
(Donthu et al., 2021).
The structure to obtain the bibliographic base follows Callahan’s recommenda-
tions (Callahan, 2010): Our first step was to query the core collection of the Web
of Science (WoS) database. WoS is a digital bibliographic platform considered to
be one of the main providers of collections with more than 15,000 publications and
50,000,000 articles or studies that are relevant for the evaluation of the world’s scien-
tific production (Baier-Fuentes et al., 2019; Merigó et al., 2015). Although alternative
databases exist, the material included in WoS is expected to be of the highest quality
standards (Merigó et al., 2015). The employed indices are: SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI,
A&HCI, CPCI- S, CPCI-SSH, BKCI-S, BKCI-SSH, ESCI, CCR-EXPANDED and
IC.

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1712 International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737

Fig. 1 Distribution of documents

published per year for research into
FEL factors (2000–2020). Source:
the authors based on data from the
WoS

Secondly, we defined appropriate search terms using search equations Topic:

(“leader*” and “entrepre*”), combined with factors or skills by including all the rela-
tive terms: AND Topic: (“abilit*” or “capabilit*” or “attribut*” or “skill*” or “fac-
tor*” or “competenc*” or “behavior*” or “trait*” or “feature*”). The following filter
was added to obtain gender-focused results: AND Topic: (“female” or “gender” or
“wom*” or “femin*”).
Thirdly, the time frame was defined. The selected period was 2000–20201, which
is long enough to understand how the literature in this field has evolved. The results
were refined by choosing only articles and reviews and, to not exclude countries of
authorship, articles published in all languages were included. As 15 publications had
no publication date, a decision was made to always include the early access date as a
preference in counts to reach 18 publications2

Results

The main results of the bibliometric analysis of the production and the graphic map
applied to the records linked with LEF research are presented below. The search
process obtained 183 publications distributed into 176 articles and seven reviews.

Publications: distribution per year and citation structure

The number of publications per year that address the topic of leadership factors
in entrepreneurship with a gender approach has grown in the last 6 years of our
study period (see Fig. 1). In 2000, no publications were recorded, and the object of
this research was hardly of interest from 2001 to 2012. It was from 2013 when the
field began to have timidly draw the scientific community’s attention. Publications
increased and became more sustained during the 2015–2020 period, with almost 85%
of all the published articles, and an average of almost 26 articles per year, and an
average of 40 in the last 2 years alone.
However, understanding these leadership factors in female entrepreneurship (FE)
is still an emerging field as 81% of the papers indexed in the WoS database had less
than 10 citations according to Table 1. This highlights the little influence the papers in

1
The WoS database extraction date was 23 January, 2021.
2
Early access articles are fully peer-reviewed, citable and published, but have not yet been assigned any
volume/number/page number (source: WoS).

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International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737 1713

Table 1 General citation Citations Total papers %

structure
≥ 200 citations 1 0.5%
≥ 100 citations < 200 2 1.1%
≥ 50 citations < 100 3 1.6%
≥ 20 citations < 50 10 5.5%
≥ 10 citations < 20 18 9.8%
≥ 1 citation < 10 101 55.2%
= 0 citation 48 26.2%
Source: The authors based on
the WoS Total Papers 183 100%

this specific research field have had. The general citation structure allowed us to anal-
yse the amount of documents related to a citation threshold to be analysed (Cancino
et al., 2017). Thus 26% of the indexed papers had no citations at all, 91% were cited
less than 20 times, and only one document had at least 200 citations.
The annual citation structure of the published documents (see Table 2) showed that
the year with the most citations was 2001 with 313, followed by 2015 with 239. The
most cited articles usually appeared in the most remote years because an article needs
a 3-7-year period to obtain the most citations (Wang, 2013). This basis revealed,
however, that 90% of the articles were published in the most recent years during the
period 2013–2020 with more than 60% of all the citations.
By way of conclusion, the interest shown in leadership factors topic in FE has
grown, but researchers’ interest has only been modest since 2015. This finding high-
lights the novelty of the field, but papers have a low citation rate compared to the
general entrepreneurship field.
These results fall in line with researchers’ findings in this field, who conclude that,
although EL has been studied for several decades, it still has no clear identity because
no tools have been developed to assess these factors (behaviours, skills or character-
istics) in the field (Leitch et al., 2013; Renko et al., 2015).

The most influential articles in female EL research

This section analyses the most influential and popular articles in the database. The
indicators used for this purpose were citations received (TC) (Baier-Fuentes et al.,
2019; Donthu et al., 2021) and the citations that the article received on average the
year it was published (TC/Y). This relative ratio allows the influence of the article to
be compared regardless of the year when it was published (Gil-Gomez et al., 2021).
Table 3 shows the 20 most cited articles. Authors like Gundry and Welsh, Vecchio
and Buttner have published the three most influential articles for receiving the most
citations between 2001 and 2003. The most cited article (212) is that by Gundry and
Welsh (2003). The article with the highest ratio of citations received per publication
year (TC/Y) was that of Balachandra, Briggs, Eddleston and Brush which, despite
being published in 2019, has obtained 15 citations per year. It was followed by the
article by Neumeyer and Santos (2019) with 12.
The most influential article investigated high-growth strategies in a group of
women entrepreneurs in the industrial sector “beyond examining the relationship

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Table 2 Annual citation structure for research into female entrepreneurial leadership factors research
Year TP TC ≥ 200 ≥ 100 ≥ 50 ≥ 20 ≥ 10 ≥1
2000 0 0
2001 2 313 1 2 2 2 2 2
2002 1 119 1 1 1 1 1
2003 4 83 1 1 2 4
2004 0 0
2005 0 0
2006 1 5 1
2007 1 16 1 1
2008 1 2 1
2009 1 6 1
2010 1 5 1
2011 3 14 2
2012 2 28 2 2
2013 5 123 1 2 5 5
2014 7 90 1 1 2 7
2015 17 239 5 8 17
2016 13 53 1 8
2017 21 105 1 3 19
2018 23 136 2 4 18
2019 36 132 1 3 27
2020 44 24 18
Total 183 1493 1 3 6 16 34 135
% 100% 0.5% 1.6% 3.3% 8.7% 18.6% 73.8%
Abbreviations: TP: Total Papers; TC: Total number of citations; Number of papers with ≥ of 200, 100,
50, 20, 10 and 1 citation/s.
Source: The authors based on the WoS with Excel

between gender and (personal) entrepreneurial characteristics” (Gundry & Welsch,

2001) with a descriptive approach, but without a theoretical framework.
Vecchio studied sex/gender differences in social behaviour and leader effective-
ness, and concludes that claims of gender comparative advantage, based on stereo-
typical reasoning, are exaggerated. So for him a “fine-grained” analytical approach
is essential as is “including the temporal dimensions and the leader’s perceived toler-
ance of demographic differences” (Vecchio, 2002). The same author in 2003 situated
entrepreneurship as a type of leadership, but without recognising the EL field in its
own right (Vecchio, 2003).
Buttner delved into differences in leadership between men and women from a
feminist social perspective with an exploratory content analysis. Her results showed
that the relational theory is a useful framework for identifying and explaining the
interactive style of women entrepreneurs in their own firm (Buttner, 2001).
Balachandra et al., (2019) broke away from traditional patterns and employed
the gender role congruence theory to demonstrate that women entrepreneurs do not
experience prejudice from venture capitalists because they are women, but when
they exhibit strongly stereotypical feminine behaviours. Masculinity does not pro-
vide any advantage in venture capital pitches, but femininity provides a disadvantage
(Balachandra et al., 2019).

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Table 3 The 20 most cited documents between 2000 and 2020 in WoS Core
No. TC Title Authors Year TC/Y
1 212 The ambitions entrepreneur: High growth Gundry, LK; Welsch, HP 2001 11
strategies of women-owned enterprises
2 119 Leadership and gender advantage Vecchio, RP 2002 6
3 101 Examining female entrepreneurs’ manage- Buttner, EH 2001 5.1
ment style: An application of a relational
frame
4 61 Generating political will for safe motherhood Shiffman, J 2003 3.4
in Indonesia
5 58 A cross cultural study of gender-role orienta- Mueller, Stephen L.; Dato- 2013 7.1
tion and entrepreneurial self-efficacy on, Mary Conway
6 53 Gender disparity in the C-suite: Do male and Fitzsimmons, Terrance W.; 2014 7.6
female CEOs differ in how they reached the Callan, Victor J.; Paulsen,
top? Neil
7 47 The Influence of Social and Human Capital McGowan, Pauric; Cooper, 2015 8
in Developing Young Women as Entrepre- Sarah; Durkin, Mark;
neurial Business Leaders O’Kane, Caroline
8 38 Sustainable business models, venture ty- Neumeyer, Xavier; Santos, 2018 12
pologies, and entrepreneurial ecosystems: A Susana C.
social network perspective
9 29 Don’t Pitch Like a Girl!: How Gender Ste- Balachandra, Lakshmi; 2019 15
reotypes Influence Investor Decisions Briggs, Tony; Eddleston,
Kim; Brush, Candida
10 29 Political Empowerment, Rule of Law, and Goltz, Sonia; Buche, Mari 2015 4.8
Women’s Entry into Entrepreneurship W.; Pathak, Saurav
11 28 The dearth of daughter successors in family Overbeke, Kathyann Kes- 2013 4
businesses: Gendered norms, blindness to sler; Bilimoria, Diana;
possibility, and invisibility Perelli, Sheri
12 27 Developing women leaders through entrepre- Bullough, Amanda; de 2015 4.5
neurship education and training Luque, Mary Sully; Abdelza-
her, Dina; Heim, Wynona
13 26 Academics’ entrepreneurship propensities Goel, Rajeev K.; Goktepe- 2015 4.3
and gender differences Hulten, Devrim; Ram, Rati
14 25 How prepared are academic administrators? Morris, Tracy L.; Laipple, 2015 4
Leadership and job satisfaction within US Joseph S.
research universities
15 20 Narcissistic rhetoric and crowdfunding per- Anglin, Aaron H.; Wolfe, 2018 7
formance: A social role theory perspective Marcus T.; Short, Jeremy
C.; McKenny, Aaron F.; Pid-
duck, Robert J.
16 20 Individual dynamic managerial capabilities: Buil-Fabrega, Marian; del 2017 5
Influence over environmental and social Mar Alonso-Almeida, Maria;
commitment under a gender perspective Bagur-Femenias, Llorenc
17 19 What drives future business leaders? How Lechner, Clemens M.; 2018 6
work values and gender shape young adults’ Sortheix, Florencia M.; Ob-
entrepreneurial and leadership aspirations schonka, Martin; Salmela-
Aro, Katariina
18 17 The Role of Competencies in Shaping the Bamiatzi, Vassiliki; Jones, 2015 3
Leadership Style of Female Entrepreneurs: Sally; Mitchelmore, Siwan;
The Case of North West of England, York- Nikolopoulos, Konstantinos
shire, and North Wales

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Table 3 (continued)
No. TC Title Authors Year TC/Y
19 16 Leadership styles and corporate social del Mar Alonso-Almeida, 2017 4
responsibility management: Analysis from a Maria; Perramon, Jordi;
gender perspective Bagur-Femenias, Llorenc
20 16 Entrepreneurial leadership competencies Bagheri, Afsaneh; Pihie, 2013 2
among Malaysian university student entre- Zaidatol Akmaliah Lope;
preneurial leaders Krauss, Steven Eric
Abbreviations: TC: Total number of citations; TC/Y: The total of citations in the number of years that
the document has been published.
Source: Obtained from the VOS viewer software

We observe that the most influential articles in FEL still reproduce the same pat-
tern of contemporary research into gender and entrepreneurship with a descriptive
approach, but without a theoretical framework. This reproduces discriminatory gen-
der relations. To leave aside “this impasse”, an alternative and conceptually informed
feminist critique with a poststructuralist approach is needed (Henry et al., 2015).
Do these most influential articles have similar contents?
One of the cartographic techniques that allows us to find is bibliographic linking.
It examines whether two publications that share common references also have similar
contents (Kessler, 1963). It divides publications into thematic groups based on the
shared references which allow certain recent and niche publications to gain visibility
by providing insight into the latest advances (Donthu et al., 2021).
According to Fig. 2, with a minimum of 10 citations per article, this results in 32
articles, organised into eight clusters of bibliographically coupled documents. The
most influential cluster with the most citations is the yellow cluster formed by Gun-
dry, Vecchio, Buttner and others, who all published between 2001 and 2007 with a
feminist social or women’s management approach by a traditional methodology that
perpetrates women’s subordination. The largest cluster is the red one with seven arti-
cles sharing a bibliography. The article by Mueller et al. (2013) is bibliographically
coupled to the articles by Bagheri (2013), McGowan el al. (2015), Bamiatzi (2015),
Morris (2015), Goltz (2015), and most recently to Lechner (2018). All these articles
address entrepreneurship and leadership from a social construction and contextual
gender research approach. Bagheri et al. (2013) and Goltz (2015) cite the EL field in
its own right. The most recent cluster is that formed by Balachandra (2019), Bullough
(2015), Anglin (2018) and Hmieleski (2019), showing how stereotypes are socially
constructed and impact FE. The green cluster led by Fitzsimmons (2014) shares a
group that highlights some articles on CEOs and family entrepreneurship.

The most productive and cited publication sources in research

The studied articles are published in more than 140 journals. Table 4 shows the 20
most productive journals (TP) with some bibliometric indicators, such as the total
number of citations received by articles (TC) and their distribution in thresholds,
the h-index (H), the average number of citations per article (TC/TP), the IF and the
percentage of articles on the total base per journal (% TP).

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Fig. 2 Bibliographic Coupling of Documents. Source: VOSviewer

Following the classification by Baier et al. (2019), we distributed the journals in

our database into the following main categories: entrepreneurship journals (Interna-
tional Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, Entrepreneurship and Regional
Development, International Journal of Entrepreneurship Behavior & Research, Jour-
nal of Social Entrepreneurship among others); business and enterprise journals (Jour-
nal of Business Venturing, Journal of Business Research, Small Business Economics,
Journal of Business Ethics), management journals (Management Decision, Journal of
Management Studies, Journal of Management), human resources journals (Advances
in Developing Human Resources), ethics journals (Journal of Business Ethics), envi-
ronmental journals (JCP), psychology journals (Frontiers In Psychology), gender
journals (International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship, Gender In Manage-
ment), technology journals (JTT), science and humanities journals (Pertanika Journal
of Social Science and Humanities), and journals that fell into several categories like
Management and Business at the same time (Journal of Small Business Management)
Performance differs depending on the employed indicator. The most productive
journals are the Journal of Small Business Management (JSBM) and the International
Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship (JGE). In turn, the journal with the most
cited articles is the Journal of Business Venturing (JBV), followed by Leadership
Quarterly (LQ), which are the journals with the highest IF. These journals, together
with Small Business Economics (SBE) and Journal of Cleaner Production (JCP),
have a recognised reputation with an IF2020 over 6 for their high scientific pro-
ductivity level, and also for publishing papers with a citation threshold of over 100.
However, the Journal of Business Ethics (JBE) has the best citation-to-article ratio
ahead of JBV and LQ. The citation structure revealed that only three journals have
published one article or more with at least 100 citations or more, LQ with two, and
JBV and JBE with one. It is worth noting that a journal like SBE, which ranks 4th in
the IF of the presented base, has no cited articles. This is because the three articles it
has published were early accessed in November and December 2020 (see Table 5),

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Table 4 Citation structure of the journals that publish the most
Journal TP TC H TC/ TP IF 2020 IF 5 years % TP ≥ 200 ≥ 100 ≥ 50 ≥ 10 ≥1
Journal of Small Business Management 8 118 6 15 4.544 6.799 4.4% 0 0 0 2 3
International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship 6 16 3 3 NA NA 3.3% 0 0 0 0 0
Journal of Cleaner Production 4 60 2 15 9.297 9.444 2.2% 0 0 0 2 2
Advances in Developing Human Resources 4 1 1 0 NA NA 2.2% 0 0 0 0 0
Journal of Technology Transfer 4 53 3 13 5.783 6.552 2.2% 0 0 0 1 3
Management Decision 4 26 2 7 4.957 4.816 2.2% 0 0 0 0 1
Small Business Economics 3 0 0 0 8.164 8.139 1.6% 0 0 0 0 0
Journal of Business Venturing 3 243 3 81 12.065 15.732 1.6% 1 1 1 2 3
International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal 3 65 2 22 5.94 6.458 1.6% 0 0 1 1 1
Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship 3 0 0 0 NA NA 1.6% 0 0 0 0 0
Journal of East European Management Studies 2 6 1 3 0.821 1.016 1.1% 0 0 0 0 0
Gender In Management 2 3 1 2 2.293 2.425 1.1% 0 0 0 0 0
Pertanika Journal of Social Science and Humanities 2 0 0 0 NA NA 1.1% 0 0 0 0 0
Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies 2 3 1 2 NA NA 1.1% 0 0 0 0 0
Academia-Revista Latinoamericana de Administracion 2 18 2 9 1.108 1.255 1.1% 0 0 0 0 1
Frontiers In Psychology 2 1 1 1 NA NA 1.1% 0 0 0 0 0
Career Development International 2 10 2 5 3.792 4.03 1.1% 0 0 0 0 0
Ciriec-España Revista De Economia Publica Social Y Cooperativa 2 3 1 2 NA NA 1.1% 0 0 0 0 0
Leadership Quarterly 2 172 2 86 10.517 11.319 1.1% 0 1 2 2 2
Journal of Business Ethics 1 101 1 101 6.43 7.83 0.55% 0 1 1 1 1
Abbreviations in Table 2; H: h-index investigation base; IF: Index Factor; NA: not available
Source: The authors based on WoS with BibExcel
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International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737 1719

which left no time for it to be cited. The journals that stand out as the most influential
and productive are some of the most important ones in the entrepreneurship, manage-
ment and organisational theory fields.
By analysing the evolution of journal publications with time, Table 5 shows how
journals are residual and random over time and do not follow a pattern of continuity.
However, we see how the pioneering journals that publish are JBV, JBE and LQ, but
they do not continue to publish on the topic with a gender focus. The journals that
have emerged in the last 2 years are Advances in Developing Human Resources,
which has published four research papers in the last year of our study period, and
SBM with four papers in the last 2 years
Finally, 35% of the journals with published research are based in the USA and
25% in the UK. The remaining 20% come from Western European countries. As
Ahl (2004) points out, discursive practices are followed to produce research articles.
Writing and publication practices, disciplinary norms and institutional support play
an important role in shaping research texts because they guide and limit conversation
(Huff, 1999). In this case, the literature base is published in journals dominated by an
American institutional order that reproduce particular practices, and is also framed
within business and entrepreneurship journals

Research area

Table 6 shows the categories per research area. Here 60% of the articles in our
research belong to the Economics and Business category with 110 publications, and
1,130 citations in all. Psychology, Social Sciences and Education and Engineering
are research areas that also stand out in this base, among others.
The FEL subject area has several areas in which researchers publish (although the
economics and business category predominates), which is also reflected in the many
journals chosen with different themes, as seen in the section on publication sources.
This is because EL is interchangeably associated with two fields that are normally
taken as separate areas: leadership (associated with people management and psy-
chology) and entrepreneurship (associated with the management and business areas).
However a few decades ago, several scholars started drawing parallels between the
two Lippitt, 1987; Vecchio, 2003; Gupta et al., 2004; Cogliser & Brigham, 2004; C.
Harrison & Burnard, 2019) by taking different positions and perceiving EL as either
an entrepreneurship subdomain or a leadership type. Recently, there has been a shift
towards a holistic approach that conceives EL as a field that benefits from the mutual
cross-fertilisation of both fields (Leitch & Harrison, 2018; Karpinskaia & Shirokova,
2019), but debate about the fragmented approach to the discipline base still persists
today (Harrison et al., 2015).

Most prolific and influential authors and cooperation

This section aims to identify not only the highest performing and most influential
authors, but also the distribution by the citation thresholds of publications among the
more than 500 researchers in the FEL field of the database. Number of publications
is used to obtain the most productive authors. To know the most influential authors,

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Table 5 Evolution of publications per journal over time (2000–2020)

13
Journal 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Total
Journal of Small Business Management (USA) 3 4 1 8
International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship (England) 1 3 2 6
Journal of Cleaner Production (USA) 1 1 1 1 4
Advances in Developing Human Resources (USA) 4 4
Journal of Technology Transfer (USA) 1 1 2 4
Management Decision (England) 1 1 2 4
Small Business Economics (Netherlands) 3 3
Journal of Business Venturing (USA) 1 1 1 3
International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (USA) 1 2 3
Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship (Singapore) 1 1 1 3
Journal of East European Management Studies (Germany) 1 1 2
Gender In Management (England) 2 2
Pertanika Journal of Social Science and Humanities (Malaysia) 1 1 2
Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies (England) 1 1 2
Academia-Revista Latinoamericana de Administracion (Colombia) 1 1 2
Frontiers In Psychology (Switzerland) 2 2
Career Development International (England) 1 1 2
Ciriec-España Revista de Economia Publica Social y Cooperativa 1 1 2
(Spain)
Leadership Quarterly (USA) 1 1 2
Journal of Business Ethics (Netherlands) 1 1 1
Abbreviations in Table 2.
Source: The authors based on WoS
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International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737 1721

Table 6 Main research and citation structure areas

Research Area TP % TC H TC/TP ≥ 200 ≥ 100 ≥ 50 ≥ 20 ≥ 10 ≥1
Business & Economics 110 60.1% 1130 16 10 1 3 5 12 23 82
Psychology 13 7.1% 224 5 17 1 2 3 3 11
Social Sciences - Other 13 7.1% 148 5 11 1 1 1 2 10
Topics
Education & Educational 10 5.5% 62 3 6 1 3 9
Research
Engineering 10 5.5% 123 5 12 3 5 8
Science & Technology - 8 4.4% 73 4 9 2 2 6
Other Topics
Environmental Sciences & 6 3.3% 69 3 12 2 2 5
Ecology
Agriculture 5 2.7% 25 3 5 1 5
Development Studies 5 2.7% 30 3 6 1 4
Abbreviations are shown in Table 2.
Source: The authors based on WoS with BibExcel

certain measures are employed, such as citations obtained, citations per publication
or the h-index are used (Donthu et al., 2021).
Table 7 shows the 15 authors who have published the most articles in research,
along with their respective institutions and countries of origin. It also includes the
distribution per citation thresholds of their publications. Table 5 presents the most
influential authors in terms of citations received or citations per publication. The
results reveal that the most productive authors do not coincide with the most influ-
ential authors.
According to Table 4, the most productive authors are Goel and Goktepe-hulten
with three published articles. Of the top 15 authors, only Neumeyer and Santos have
received more than 50 citations for all their articles. Authors’ h-index is used to mea-
sure authors’ scientific performance or the employed database, but does not provide
relevant information.
However according to Table 8, the most influential authors are Gundry and Welsch
because they are the most cited ones with 212 citations. They are followed by Vec-
chio, Buttner and Shiffman (with 119 citations). One possible explanation for this
difference is that the most prolific authors (Goel and Goktepe-hulten) have obtained
a few citations when publishing in the most recent years (2015, 2018 and late in
2019). In contrast, the most influential ones have published between 2001 and 2003.
The time factor should be taken into account when constructing an author’s influ-
ence because it takes a certain number of years before an article obtains a volume
of citations (Wang, 2013). Another reason lies in researchers’ publication journals.
Goel and Goktepe-hulten have published all their articles in Journal of Technology
Transfer (JTT) in the management area, but have clearly focused on innovation and
technology transfer, and not on a common publication area in the EL field (see the
green cluster in Fig. 3). This is also true for the two articles by Neumeyer and Santos
in relation to the journals chosen for their publications, namely JTT and Journal of
Cleaner Production (JCP). Neither of these journals belongs to the most influential

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Table 7 The 15 authors who have published the most on the FEL factors topic
No. Author University Country TP TC H H* TC/ TP ≥ 100 ≥50 ≥ 10 ≥1
1 Goel RK Illinois State University USA 3 40 2 21 13.3 2 2
2 Goktepe-hulten D Lund University SWEDEN 3 40 2 7 13.3 2 2
3 Santos SC Rowan University USA 2 50 2 9 25.5 2 2
4 Neumeyer X University of North Carolina USA 2 50 2 8 25.5 2 2
5 Bullough A University of Delaware USA 2 39 2 11 19.5 2 2
6 Deluque MS Thunderbird Sch Global, Arizona Management USA 2 39 2 13 19.5 2 2
7 Alonso Almeida MD Autonomous University of Madrid SPAIN 2 36 2 23 18 2 2
8 Bagurfemenias L Pompeu Fabra University SPAIN 2 36 2 11 18 2 2
9 Lepeley MT Global Inst Qual Educ Execut Programs USA 2 27 2 3 13.5 2 2
10 Kuschel K Universidad del Desarrollo CHILE 2 27 2 2 13.5 2 2
11 Obschonka M Queensland University of Technology AUSTRALIA 2 21 2 23 11 1 1
12 Bagheri A University of Tehran IRAN 2 16 1 9 8 1 1
13 Pihie ZAL Universiti Putra Malaysia MALAYSIA 2 16 1 8 8 1 1
14 Van Praag M Copenhagen Business School DENMARK 2 11 2 18 6.5 2
15 Bernardino S Polytechnic Institute of Porto PORTUGAL 2 6 1 3 3 2
Abbreviations: TP: Total Papers; TC: Total number of citations; H: Author h-index database; H*: Author h-index (WoS).
Source: The authors based on WoS with BibExcel
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International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737 1723

Fig. 3 Co-authorship per authors

with overlay visualisation (source:
VOSviewer)

journals in the entrepreneurship and leadership field, which are Journal of Business
Venturing (JBV), Leadership Quarterly (LQ), among others (Ahl, 2004)
Thanks to these authors’ affiliation data, we find that the most productive authors
come mainly from US. institutions, but with collaboration between several institu-
tions from the same country or from other countries like Sweden and Australia. All
this suggests cooperation.
To find out which authors collaborate consistently and have a stronger impact, and
to gain insight into new emerging author cooperation trends (Zupic & Čater, 2015),
we used the overlay visualisation of co-authorships per author (see Fig.3 ). To visu-
alise research trends, co-authors were overlaid with their average year of publication
using colours to represent their temporal variation. The terms depicted in dark blue
were published around 2015/2016 on average, green represents those with a mean
year of publication at around 2018.5 and the year of publication of the keywords
in yellow is around 2020. The graphical map in Fig.3 shows the 28 authors with a
minimum threshold of two articles and zero citations. The oldest research group is
Bullough and De Luque from the USA, which published around 2015, followed by
Bagheri and Pihie who published around 2015.5 and are respectively from Iran and
Malaysia. Lepeley and Kuschel (USA and Chile) published in mid-2016 on average.
Bagur-Femenias and Alonso-Almeida (Spain) published two articles around 2017,
with 33 on average. Goel and Goktepe-hulten follow with three articles around 2017
(USA and Sweden). The articles of Neumeyer and Santos (USA) have an average
publication date of 2018. What is interesting about this graph is the emerging coop-
eration shown in yellow, such as Cho’s South Korean group, Nili’s US group, among
others. The data in Fig.3 , therefore, reveal interesting cooperation between authors
from institutions of different geographical origins, such as the USA, Chile and Swe-
den, with at least two articles and origins other than the USA, which is the most
productive country, and Spain or other emerging groups like that from South Korea.

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Table 8 The most cited authors in the research field
No. Author University Country TC TP H TC/ TP ≥ 200 ≥ 100 ≥ 50 ≥ 10 ≥1
1 Gundry LK DePaul University Chicago USA 212 1 1 212 1 1 1 1 1
2 Welsch HP DePaul University Chicago USA 212 1 1 212 1 1 1 1 1
3 Vecchio RP University of Notre Dame USA 119 1 1 119 1 1 1 1
4 Buttner EH University of North Carolina USA 101 1 1 101 1 1 1 1
5 Shiffman J Johns Hopkins University USA 61 1 1 61 1 1 1
6 Dato-on MC Rollins College USA 58 1 1 58 1 1 1
7 Mueller SL Griffith University AUSTRALIA 58 1 1 58 1 1 1
8 Paulsen N University of Queensland AUSTRALIA 53 1 1 53 1 1 1
9 Callan VJ University of Queensland AUSTRALIA 53 1 1 53 1 1 1
10 Fitzsimmons TW University of Queensland AUSTRALIA 53 1 1 53 1 1 1
11 Neumeyer X University of North Carolina USA 50 2 2 25 2 2
12 Santos SC Rowan University USA 50 2 2 25 2 2
13 Cooper S University of Edinburgh SCOTLAND 47 1 1 47 1 1
14 Mcgowan P Ulster University NORTHERN IRELAND 47 1 1 47 1 1
15 Durkin M Ulster University NORTHERN IRELAND 47 1 1 47 1 1
16 O’kane C NA NORTHERN IRELAND 47 1 1 47 1 1
17 Goktepehulten D Lund University SWEDEN 40 3 2 13 2 2
18 Goel RK Illinois State University USA 40 3 2 13 2 2
19 Deluque MS Thunderbird Sch Global USA 39 2 2 20 1 2
20 Bullough A University of Delaware USA 39 2 2 20 1 2
Abbreviations in Table 7.
Source: The authors based on the WoS with BibExcel
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International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737 1725

Fig. 4 Co-authorship per country

(source: VOSviewer)

Geographical distribution of the most productive and cited countries and

collaboration per country

After analysing the geographical distribution of the papers, Table 9 shows publishers’
top 15 countries of origin from the most numerous to the fewest articles and cita-
tions. The USA is the country with the most publications on the topic of women’s EL
factors with 61 publications, followed by Spain with 18, and Germany and England
with 12. Once again, the citation structure differs from article production because,
although the USA and Spain also received the most citations, Australia came third,
followed by Canada.
To further analyse countries and their possible relationships, country co-author-
ship is proposed. This technique shows the most productive countries, and the degree
of scientific communication and collaboration between them, by identifying those
papers with more than one author (Merigó et al., 2018).
The graphical map in Fig. 4 shows seven clusters with 22 countries with a thresh-
old of one paper per country and 10 citations. It is worth noting that the largest nodes
include the most influential countries in article production terms, in this case with the
USA and Spain and, to a lesser extent, Germany, England and India. Relationship
lines represent cooperation between countries and colours delimit clusters. It can
be concluded that the USA cooperates with Portugal and Tanzania, while Spain, the
second largest producer, cooperates with Finland and Sweden. Germany cooperates
with United Arab Emirates and England, and has the same geographical cluster with
Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Once again, the USA is the most influential
and dominant country in co-authorship terms.

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Table 9 15 Countries that publish the most on the entrepreneurial leadership factors topic
No. Country TP TC H TC/TP ≥ 200 ≥ 100 ≥ 50 ≥ 10 ≥1
1 USA 61 975 14 16 1 3 5 21 36
2 SPAIN 18 110 6 6.1 4 6
3 GERMANY 12 56 5 4.7 2 7
4 ENGLAND 12 49 4 4.1 1 2
5 INDIA 11 16 2 1.5 5
6 CANADA 8 58 3 7.3 2 3
7 AUSTRALIA 7 89 3 12.7 1 2 3
8 PORTUGAL 6 54 3 9.0 1 2
9 THE NETHERLANDS 6 25 3 4.2 1
10 BRAZIL 5 4 1 0.8 3
11 SWEDEN 5 42 2 8.4 2 4
12 PEOPLES R CHINA 5 3 1 0.6 3
13 CHILE 4 38 4 9.5 1 3
14 FINLAND 4 33 3 8.3 2 2
15 U ARAB EMIRATES 4 10 2 2.5 1 1
Abbreviations in Table 2. H: h-index research database.
Source: The authors based on WoS with BibExcel

Fig. 5 .Co-citation of references (source: VOSviewer)

Foundational theme and intellectual structure of the literature

We attempted to investigate the foundational intellectual structure on which LEF

researchers have been based through the co-citation of publications, which occurs
when two papers are cited in a third paper (Merigó et al., 2018). In this way, we
can discover thematic clusters, seminal publications, and foundations of knowledge
(Donthu et al., 2021) because frequently co-cited publications are thematically simi-
lar (Hjørland, 2013).
Figure 5 reflects the 17 papers with a minimum of 10 citations per reference. We
observe two distinct thematic clusters. The red cluster is formed by articles on femi-

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International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737 1727

Fig. 6 .Co-citation of authors. (source: VOSviewer)

nist approaches, led by Ahl’s article where she encourages searching for new direc-
tions in research into women entrepreneurs. Ahl is a renowned Swedish researcher on
FE who occupies a gender social constructionist position that encourages the choice
of a poststructuralist epistemological research framework. The other cluster consists
of authors researching factors in EL, mostly without a gender focus and others, like
Shinnar, with a gender focus to reproduce the dominant male model.
An author co-citation analysis results when an author cites in his/her publication
a paper by one author, together with a paper by another author and, therefore, aims
to show the structure and connections of the authors most frequently cited together
(Gaviria-Marin et al., 2019), and to understand the structure of the scientific commu-
nity in a particular field. In Fig. 6 with a minimum of 15 citations from one author, 40
met the threshold. We observe a bibliometric map on which citation connections are
established between authors and form four thematic clusters. In the green node, Ahl
appears again as the most co-cited. Ahl is co-cited with: De Bruin and Brush, who
have articles together that suggest the scarcity of FE research; Kuratko, Shane and
Harrison, who investigate the skills, intentions, competencies and capabilities that
form part of EL with no gender prism. The blue node comprises mainly the female
authors who explore gender in organisations and gender stereotypes. Eagly is an
author who has researched leadership style and gender, and is co-cited with: Marlow,
who investigates entrepreneurship from a feminist perspective; Bird and Gupta, who
investigate the creation of organisations from a gender perspective; Heilman, who
studies the impact of stereotypes for women in companies. Interestingly, the Euro-
pean Commission appears as a co-cited author. In the red node, we find Krueger, who
is co-cited with Hofstede, Bandura, among others, who publish on leadership factors

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Fig. 7 Co-citation of Journals (source: VOSviewer)

in entrepreneurship, such as entrepreneurial intentions, self-efficacy or the influence

of culture, but do not address the gender approach.
Figure 7 analyses co-citations between journals to find out which journals dis-
seminate the concept and whether they have a common thematic organisation or spe-
cialisations (Blanco-Mesa et al., 2017). The larger the node size, the more citations
journals have received, and the smaller the distance between nodes, the higher the
co-citation frequency, and vice versa (Liao et al., 2018). Sixty sources were obtained
with a minimum threshold of 25 citations. The observed large scientific domains are
as follows: the blue one with journals that form part of the same thematic organ-
isation on business, economics and entrepreneurship (Entrepreneurship theory and
practice (ETP), JBV, JSBM and SBE). The red group of journals stands out for
belonging to areas like psychology, the study of human resources and leadership.
It even includes women’s studies, with the Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP) as
a reference in terms of citations and links or LQ. The green cluster is related to the
management area with Academy Management Review and Journal Management as
the largest nodes for being the most cited. In this cluster we also find the JCP journal.
Finally, the yellow cluster is the smallest one and contains journals like Journal of
Vocational Behavior that deal with human behaviour and applied psychology, or even
philosophy.
In conclusion, this graphical map analysis corroborates some of the common areas
in which the cited journals are connected. It is interesting to see how the journal ETP
stands out as one of the most co-cited journals because of its large node and its mul-
titude of connections, but it only publishes one article on FEL factors. Journals such
as Journal of Cleaner Production (JCP), Journal of Technology Transfer (JTT) and
Advances in Developing Human Resources (ADHR) are among the most productive
journals and are hardly co-cited.

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Table 10 Commonest author No. keyword occurrences TLS

keywords
1 entrepreneurship 30 34
2 gender 27 30
3 leadership 18 21
4 entrepreneurial intentions 12 8
5 women 11 12
6 women entrepreneurs 9 3
7 family business 7 10
8 culture 7 10
9 social entrepreneurship 7 7
10 innovation 7 6
11 female entrepreneurship 5 5
12 self-efficacy 5 4
13 succession 4 8
14 sustainability 4 5
15 career development 4 4
16 women entrepreneurship 4 3
17 competencies 3 3
18 education 3 6
19 development 3 3
20 management 3 2
Source: Obtained from the
VOS viewer software Abbreviations: TLS: Total Link Strength

Trends across keyword research: co-occurrences of author keywords

A content analysis has the potential to discover emergent fields because it establishes
relationships and builds a conceptual structure of the domain (Ellegaard & Wallin,
2015). Therefore, the main keywords in the document base were analysed with the
co-occurrence of author keywords. When words co-occur frequently in documents,
it means that the concepts behind those words are closely related (Zupic & Čater,
2015). This semantic field helps us to understand the cognitive structure because the
result is a network of topics whose relationships represent the conceptual space of a
field (Börner et al., 2003).
The present study identified the most frequent author keywords and those that
most frequently appear in the same documents (Merigó et al., 2018). Table 10 shows
the commonest author keywords with their respective co-occurrences and total link
strength. Apart from logical main words like entrepreneurship, gender, leadership,
among others, other words stand out: culture, family business, social entrepreneur-
ship, innovation, self-efficacy, succession, sustainability, career development, com-
petencies, education, development and management.
Figure 8 shows the main keywords and takes a threshold of three occurrences of
one keyword and the 100 most representative connections. Twenty-five keywords
stand out, which means that for all the 25 keywords, the total strength of co-occur-
rence links with other keywords is calculated by selecting the keywords with the
highest total link strength. To show research trends, author keywords were over-
lay visualised with their average year of publication using colours to represent their
temporal variation. The terms depicted in dark blue were published around 2016 on

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Fig. 8 Co-occurrence of authors

keywords with overlay visualiza-
tion. (source: VOSviewer)

average, those in green have an average year of publication around 2018.5, and the
average year of publication of the keywords in yellow is around 2020.
The average year of publication of the terms leadership, management, women,
development and trust is around 2016. The words gender, innovation or family
business appear about 2017. Around 2018, the terms entrepreneurship, role model,
equality, community, self-efficacy, skills or social entrepreneurship emerge. Halfway
through 2019, the words entrepreneurial intentions, women entrepreneurs, female
entrepreneurship, human capital, personal traits, skills, sustainable and social net-
work are published on average. It is worth noting that roughly in 2018 and 2019 some
entrepreneurial leadership factors appear: competences, skills, personality traits, self-
efficacy, entrepreneurial intentions and social network. Approximately in 2020 on
average, terms linked with fintech, platforms, smart technologies and young people
start to emerge. This analysis reinforces that the field is young because we do not
even observe the “entrepreneurial leadership” field term.

Discussion and Conclusions

Lessons learnt

A comprehensive bibliometric study of FEL factors is presented to provide an

overview and understanding of the state of literature’s development in the field. It
was carried out by means of two techniques used together, a bibliometric perfor-
mance analysis and graphical mapping, by studying variables like articles, principal
investigators, scientific journals, countries, research areas and keywords with their
interrelations.
We conclude that:

(a) Scientific production was not significant until 2015, and is a young and under-
developed research field in terms of the number of publications and citations
(almost 85% of the articles were published between 2015 and 2020, and 81% of
the papers indexed in the WoS database have fewer than 10 citations). All this
reveals the novelty of the field with a gender focus.
(b) The most influential seminal article was by Ahl. She is a renowned Swedish
researcher on FE from a social constructionist gender position that encourages
the choice of a poststructuralist epistemological research framework. She is

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International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737 1731

co-cited with De Bruin and Brush, who have articles together that state the pau-
city of FE research. Eagly is an author who has researched leadership style and
gender, and is co-cited with: Marlow, who researches entrepreneurship from a
feminist perspective; Bird and Gupta, who investigate organisation building from
a gender perspective; Heilman, who studies the impact of stereotypes for women
in business.
(c) Despite the influence of feminist perspectives on the base, the most cited articles
by Gundry and Welsh (2001), Vecchio (2002) and Buttner (2001) and are cou-
pled bibliographically, still reproduce the same pattern of contemporary research
into gender and entrepreneurship with a descriptive approach, but include no
theoretical framework (Henry et al., 2015). However, the article by Balanchadra
et al. (2015), with a higher ratio of citations per year of publication, changes the
research perspective. Following the structure proposed by Ahl (Ahl, 2003), these
articles take different epistemological positions: that of Gundry et al. with that of
Vecchio, and that of Buttner, do so with a traditional objectivist epistemological
approach, with the former from an individualistic approach and the latter from
a comparative approach. Balachandra does so from extended constructionist
epistemology.
(d) The most productive journals are JSMB and IJGE. However, the most cited are
JBV, followed by LQ. Interestingly, the pioneering journals were the US bench-
mark journals in entrepreneurship and leadership JBV, JBE and LQ, with the
strongest influence given their many citations, but they stopped publishing in the
field. JSBM ranks first in productivity terms in the last 5 years, together with the
gender journal IJGE. Finally, 35% of the journals with published research are
based in the USA and 25% in England. The remaining 20% come from West-
ern countries. This reveals the possible existence of discursive practices that
can guide and limit conversation (Ahl, 2004; Huff, 1999) both by the journal’s
country of origin (Anglo-Saxon countries USA and England in our case) and by
these journals’ category (mainly management, entrepreneurship and business).
In journal co-citation terms, three clear specialisation areas appear: business and
entrepreneurship; management and psychology; organisational behaviour. The
cluster with the most co-citations and connections forms part of the same the-
matic organisation on business and economics with journals ETP, JBV, JSBM
and SBE. The other journal to stand out is JAP. It appears in another cluster: the
area of psychology and organisational behaviour.
(e) The predominant research areas are economics and business (60%) and, to a
lesser extent, psychology and social sciences. EL is associated indistinctly with
two fields that have usually been considered separate areas: leadership (associ-
ated with people management and psychology) and entrepreneurship (associated
with the areas of management and business).
(f) The most productive authors are Goel (USA) and Goktepehulten (Sweden) with
three articles, but the most cited are Gundry, Welsh and Vecchio (all the USA)
with only one. This is probably due to their publication date (the more recent,
the fewer citations received) and also to the chosen journals (for Goel and Gok-
tepehulten, journals from very specific niches like technology where the EL
field is not normally researched). Bibliographic linking by authors reveals close

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connections with similar, or even joint, research lines. This reveals interesting
co-operations between authors from institutions in different geographical loca-
tions in the USA, jointly with Chile and Sweden, or in countries like Spain, or
with other emerging groups like South Korea.
(g) Once again, the USA comes over as the most productive, influential and domi-
nant country in citations, output and co-authorship terms. The USA dominates
the publishing landscape in the studied field, followed by Spain, Germany and
England. The citation structure differs insofar as the USA and Spain also receive
the most citations, and Australia ranks third, followed by Canada. The USA col-
laborates with Portugal and Tanzania, and Spain with Finland and Sweden. Eng-
land stands out in the same geographical group with Northern Ireland, Scotland
and Wales.
(h) Trends in FEL factors, obtained by author keywords, focus on examining the
relation linking entrepreneurship, leadership and gender, but reveal some trends
like innovation and education, social entrepreneurship and sustainability or cul-
ture, family business or succession, etc.

With this bibliometric analysis, we can corroborate that the field of women’s EL
factors is still in its early days in research terms with barely any influence and pro-
duction. American discourse occupies the dominant position in the discursive com-
munity in the FE field (Ahl, 2004), the leadership field and, as we have just shown,
also in the field of FEL factors. Although the FE literature has significantly developed
(Henry et al., 2015), there is still a long way to go in the discipline of FEL and its fac-
tors. Despite its seminal studies having scholars who encourage contributions to the
field from broader poststructuralist perspectives, there is still a tendency to reproduce
traditional gender-biased research approaches.

Main limitations

Of the main limitations, we firstly highlight that which derives from the nature of the
bibliometric analysis, which is descriptive and exploratory. It provides the general
orientation of the studied field in accordance with the different analysed variables.
Secondly, the obtained results are limited to the WoS Core Collection database
which, despite being considered one of the most influential ones for classifying
research, it may have some limitations like excluding journals or papers that are not
indexed because they have recently appeared and which, for example, may be equally
influential in this field. It is, therefore, acknowledged that had another database been
chosen, the results and conclusions could have differed from those obtained.
Finally, our results represent the overall picture that was available until 2020,
which may cause these results to substantially change in the future, and also due to
low scientific output. Bibliometric data are dynamic depending on the period, output
and impact received by different dimensions. Thus any results may vary in the years
to come.

13
International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2022) 18:1707–1737 1733

Future research lines

Future research directions include the need to look more closely at this field, and
to continue research into the male dominant normative lens of both journals and
scholars, to build a clear conceptual and empirical framework from a female social
constructionist gender lens.
Another possible research line would be to analyse women entrepreneurs’ own
leadership factors, and to understand how they are manifested and constructed in
different cultural and social contexts to approach the field with higher diversity and
to enrich the construct. If the leadership factors of women entrepreneurs who are
capable of driving success in entrepreneurship can be identified and assessed (Renko
et al., 2015), then there will be excellent opportunities for this research to develop.
By exploring all these issues, the intention is to improve available knowledge, and to
outline appropriate actions or recommendations, to foster more pluralistic start-ups.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.
org/10.1007/s11365-022-00798-2.

Author contributions All authors have contributed equally to this work. All authors have read and agreed
to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding Universitat Politècnica de València.

Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.

Declarations

Conflict of interest The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or inter-
pretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use
is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission
directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.

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