Enhancing the foundations for theorising through bibliometric mapping

Purpose – The “academic revolution” that has taken place over the past 50-60 years has brought about many opportunities, but also challenges, in the lives of academics. The “publish or perish” phenomenon can be seen as one manifestation of the heated competition among universities for talent and resources. The resulting increase in publications, the decrease in the time academics have to read them, together with editors’ call for more originality, innovation, and meaning in submitted manuscripts lead to two questions. What techniques can help researchers and PhD students to effectively and efficiently navigate through large bodies of literature? What tools and techniques can be used to enhance the foundations for theorising? The purpose of this paper is to answer these two interrelated questions. Design/methodology/approach – The abstracts of 410 peer-reviewed journal articles connected to ethics in (international) marketing research are explored with software tools. The freely available VOSviewer software is used to visualise the specified body of literature. NVivo is employed to go deeper and explore specific themes identified through VOSviewer. Findings – A total of 17 clusters were identified, representing the major themes in the selected body of literature. Additionally, a number of research avenues and research questions are presented. Research limitations/implications – The analysis is based on the information provided in abstracts. Future research may wish to extend the analysis to full articles. Originality/value – The paper contributes by demonstrating how software tools such as VOSviewer and NVivo can be used to explore large bodies of literature and to experiment with research ideas to enhance the foundations for theorising.