Mapping research on strategic alliances and innovation: a co-citation analysis

Using co-citation analysis, the present study attempts to rationalize and organize the combined alliance and innovation literature in order to determine its intellectual structure (i.e. its shared attributes such as models, theories, methods, findings, and implications), as well as to gain a deeper understanding of the most important research trends. More specifically, our goals are: (1) to delineate the intellectual structure of research on alliance and innovation, as represented in the academic literature; (2) to determine the subfields that constitute the intellectual structure and the relationships, if any, between these subfields; (3) to identify contributions that play a pivotal role in bridging two or more conceptual domains of research; and finally, (4) to map the intellectual structure in a two-dimensional space in order to visualize spatial distances between intellectual themes. Implications for future studies are then drawn.