A bibliometric study of the literature on intellectual capital, digitalization and information systems: a challenge for management studies

Although the concepts of intellectual capital (IC), together with the Knowledge Management (KM), has been broadly investigated over the past 15 years through a remarkable increase in articles, books and conferences, this research area is still at first stages and the multi-disciplinary perspectives of such discipline make it a charming and prolific area of research. The popularity of KM/IC has increased for both academics and practitioners considering many high-quality books, journals, and conferences (Serenko and Bontis, 2004, 2013a, 2013b, 2017; Serenko et al., 2010). The aim of previous studies has been to establish a unique identity of IC research area in order to “achieve recognition among peers, university officials, research granting agencies, and industry professionals” (Serenko et al., 2010, p.3). Many IC areas have been debated such as the conceptualization of IC (Bontis, 1999), theories (Serenko et al., 2007), refereed journals (Serenko and Bontis, 2009) and productivity rankings and citation impact measures (Serenko and Bontis, 2004), which are critical factors of the academic sphere. Recent studies (Guthrie et al. 2012; Edvisson, 2013) highlight the need to analyze the IC in relationship to the new innovations that are characterizing the companies. In the light of this emerging changes available today, our study aims to show the evolutionary trends of research in the field of IC in digitalised age. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the relationship between intellectual capital and digitalisation and to draw a map of the interdisciplinary community focusing on this emerging issue. We carried out a quantitative bibliography analysis using number of publications and number of citations and co-citations (Pritchard, 1969; Culnan, 1986) as proxies of the influence of contributions in the intellectual capital research in a digital context. We applied this method, that allows to study the cumulative knowledge generation process in the literature. The use of SNA tools for the literature review, especially within the social sciences, (Vogel, 2012; Chabowski, Samiee and Hult, 2013) allows to examine the behavior of a scientific community (or more than one community) based on the data of the related publications (Loet Leydesdorff, 2001), discovering some links among the objects of analysis. The main results of the research indicate that the number of publications increases through the years, especially after 1995 and mainly in the 21st century, although there is a couple of drops in 2009 and 2012 in the publication trend. Furthermore, the number of citations increases almost exponentially during the years. Overall, the results obtained by the keywords co-occurrence analysis shows that some relevant issues about the relationship between IC (and its components) and digital phenomena should be still addressed. Indeed, from this preliminary analysis, it seems that only “social networks” is considered as digital phenomenon connected with IC issues, the other ones have hitherto received relatively little attention in the literature. The rest of the paper continuous as follows. The next section analyzes the literature regarding the relation between IC and digitalization. The third section focuses on the bibliometric studies carried out on IC. The fourth and fifth section describe, respectively, the research methodology and the results. Discussion of the findings and conclusions are presented in the last section.