Entrepreneurial universities: A bibliometric analysis within the business and management domains

•A bibliometric overview of the research on entrepreneurial universities is presented.•Performance analysis, science mapping, and content analysis were conducted.•Publications more than tripled in the last decade but the topic is still fragmented.•A historical evolution of the most influential papers on the topic is presented.•The contribution to socio-economic development is a hot topic for future studies. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications investigating entrepreneurial universities in the business and management fields. The authors collected 511 documents from the Web of Science and analysed them using Bibliometrix, an RStudio package for performance analysis and science mapping. The study aims to provide an overview of the evolution of research about this topic and describe the structures (i.e., conceptual, social, and intellectual) characterising it. It discusses the results to identify the main areas addressed so far and highlight gaps in the literature, offering avenues for possible future research. The results show that publications on entrepreneurial universities started over 30 years ago and show an increasing trend, more than tripling in the last 10 years. Considering authors and documents as a unit of analysis, the US and Europe perform well in terms of productivity and relevance, but the phenomenon is globally relevant. The contribution to socio-economic development, especially in developing countries, is a hot topic for future studies. Despite increasing production rates, research on this topic remains fragmented, justifying the need for more systematisation. Furthermore, the paper offers policy makers and practitioners a useful baseline for developing entrepreneurial universities and considering their technological, managerial, and organisational implications. [Display omitted]