Building the Genealogy of Family Business Internationalization: A Bibliometric Mixed-Method Approach

The paper aims to build the genealogy of the literature on Internationalization of Family Business (IFB) identifying the ‘fathers’ (the most important papers in the field), ‘ancestors’ (those on which the fathers have been built on), and ‘descendants’ (the most recent publications and topics) of the research field. Results originate from a complete database on which we used a bibliometric mixed-method approach by sequentially employing citation analysis, co-citation analysis, and bibliographic coupling. Our analysis enriches the academic debate on IFB with more understanding of the field’s knowledge structure (origins, theoretical roots, and developments), meanwhile proposing a sequential use of different bibliometric methods and providing a methodological contribution.