Structure of REDEE and EJMBE research: a bibliometric analysis

Purpose – Evaluatingexistingliteraturecanleadtoabetterunderstandingofascientificjournal ’ sstateofthe art.Inthissense,thisstudyaimstoanalyzetheglobalresearchevolutionoftheRevistaEuropeadeDirecci (cid:1) ony Economia de la Empresa (REDEE) and the European Journal of Management and Business Economics (EJMBE). Design/methodology/approach – A bibliometric analysis was conducted to acknowledge the most contributing authors, impactful articles, publication trends, keyword analysis, co-occurrence networks and collaboration networks. A total of 454 articles published between 2006 and 2022 were analyzed. Findings – The results suggest that the international strategy set in 2014 has resulted in a steadily growing number of publications and a significant increment in citations. Relationship marketing and the connections between innovation, performance and entrepreneurship are topics of interest for the EJMBE. Originality/value – Mapping existing EJMBE research through identifying the contributing authors, most impactfularticles,publicationtrends,keywordanalysis,co-occurrencenetworksandcollaborationnetworksis missingtoencouragenewresearchprojects.


Introduction
The current European Journal of Management and Business Economics (EJMBE) was first published with this new name in 2016, having Professor Enrique Bign e as its editor. This turned out to be a new phase of the journal initially designated as Revista Europea de Direcci on y Econom ıa de la Empresa (REDEE), launched in 1991 by the Academia Europea de Direcci on y Econom ıa de Empresa, thus when it was commemorating its 25th anniversary. Professor Varela and Professor Barroso were the two previous editors-in-chief of the journal (Bigne, 2016). Digitization and internationalization of this journal were two cornerstone objectives behind embracing English as the written language for all its published articles and extending its editorial board to accommodate more academics from a broader range of countries. In this context, the role of the European Academy of Management and Business Economics (AEDEM; https://redaedem.org/) has been crucial for the success of the EJMBE as it determines the strategic vision of the journal and appoints its editor. This non-profit organization aims to foster the progress of the business economics investigation by organizing two conferences per year,  This study aims to describe the global research evolution, identify the predominant themes and raise awareness for the value of EJMBE. Additionally, it provides a better understanding of the journal's current state of the art by characterizing the footprint left by the journal from 2006 to 2022 that made the journal recognized as it is nowadays. To achieve this aim, a bibliometric analysis was conducted. Bibliometrics, the discipline that studies bibliographic material quantitatively (Broadus, 1987;Quezado et al., 2022), has been used in various studies (e.g. de Diego and Almod ovar, 2022; Mart ınez-L opez et al., 2018; Ramos-Rodr ıguez and Ru ız-Navarro, 2004) from multiple research areas. Unlike other techniques, it provides an objective and reliable analysis (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017), offering an objective study of the documents published in REDEE and EJMBE. Bibliometrics uses a set of indicators to obtain information collected from research activity. The output can reveal academic productivity and evaluate scientific research performance (Durieux and Gevenois, 2010). Data were collected from Agora (2021) and Scopus databases. The analysis allows for uncovering the publication and citation structure, the most productive authors, the journal's knowledge structure and the authors' countries. This article is of particular interest to researchers considering publishing in EJMBE.
This paper's structure is as follows: methodology describes the steps followed for data collection and data analysis; the results section details the publication and citation structure, contributing authors, influential articles, characterization of the authors' keywords, analysis of the multiple correspondence evolution map and country collaboration network; finally, the conclusion section entails the top results and how these address the study aims.

Methodology
This study focused on EJMBE, former REDEE, between 2006 and 2022, using the data collected from Agora (2021) and the Scopus database. By collecting a large set of articles, we aimed to analyze an extensive review of the scientific knowledge published in EJMBE (Paul and Benito, 2018). A bibliometric analysis was used to systematically analyze science networks to acquire knowledge on the evolution and studies of a significant number of researchers (Donthu et al., 2021;Rita and Ramos, 2022).

Data selection
Scopus was the database used for data collection as scholars consider it to be where relevant publications are indexed and one of the most widely accepted bibliographic databases (Ramos et al., 2019). Moreover, it is considered the most well-organized, structured and largest scholar database (Kumar et al., 2020;Tavakoli and Wijesinghe, 2019). Although many other databases exist (e.g. Web of Science/WoS, Google Scholar), the expectation is that the Scopus database data is of the highest credibility and quality standards (Kumar et al., 2020). The use of Scopus is consistent with other bibliometric analyses (Mart ınez-L opez et al., 2018;Sharma et al., 2021). Since the REDEE and EJMBE have been indexed in Scopus only since 2009, data included 2006 to 2008 from Agora's (2021) database for a comprehensive review (Paul and Benito, 2018).
Agora is a database that provides public access to public administration scientific articles written in Spanish to disclose knowledge to foster quality investigation ( Agora, 2021).
In the first stage, data were collected from Agora's database. This database provided free access to the 114 full texts of the REDEE published articles in the designated period. The author's name, keywords, affiliation, affiliation country, source and year were extracted from each article.
In the second stage, data were retrieved from the Scopus database on January 16, 2023. We applied the terms "Revista Europea de Direcci on y Economia de la Empresa" and "European Journal of Management and Business Economics" in the source title search tool to select and extract the data. The first Scopus-indexed article published by REDEE was in 2009, while the first under the EJMBE journal title was published in 2016. Along with the data collected from each article mentioned above, the number of Scopus citations was extracted. The Agora database does not provide the number of citations. For this reason, every metric that demands citations was not applied to the articles collected in the Agora's database. The Scopus dataset comprised 287 papers from REDEE and 167 from EJMBE. A manual analysis attested no duplicates, confirming a total of 454 (114 articles from Agora; 173 REDEE articles from Scopus; 167 EJMBE articles from Scopus) published between 2006 and 2022. Retrieved data were uploaded into a CSV file and used as input for the bibliometric analysis. Considering the size of the dataset, a bibliometric analysis is considered suitable for conducting this study (Donthu et al., 2021). Before data analysis procedures, the authors' names had to be standardized since some are cited differently (e.g. "Blanco Gonz alez, A." vs "Blanco-Gonz alez, A.").

Data analysis
Data were analyzed using the "bibliometrix" package, an R-tool used for science mapping analysis (Aria et al., 2020;Bond and Buntins, 2018;Rita and Ramos, 2022). Other prominently used bibliometric software are VOSviewer, Gephi and Scimat. Each piece of software has pros and cons, and the choice is usually a researcher's decision (Donthu et al., 2021). For instance, Gephi and R's development speed and flexibility are higher than those of UNICET and Pajek. Another example is that VOSviewer does not allow merging different forms of the same word. However, that can be done using Gephi. The R package "bibliometrix" was installed in R, and the CSV file containing the data for analysis was imported. After executing all the package functions, the output provided the bibliometric descriptive and graphical results. The "bibliometrix" package allows for several analyses, such as authors' impact and productivity, citations, publication trends, keyword analysis, or author's indices (h-index, g-index, m-index) (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017). The Hirsh index (h-index) uses the number and citations per article to quantify the authors' productivity and impact (Hirsch, 2005). In turn, the g-index measures the performance of the articles (Egghe, 2006). Moreover, the m-index considers the h-index and the year of the first publication (n). Hence m-index 5 h-index/n (Halbach, 2011). For the country collaboration network analysis (Secinaro et al., 2022), the authors' affiliation country was used, and the dataset was divided into two parts: articles published in the (1) REDEE and (2) EJMBE.
Although the bibliometric analyses help to summarize and map with objectivity and reliability the research published in EJMBE, they are mainly descriptive (Palmatier et al., 2018;Rita and Ramos, 2022). The analysis of the bibliometric data allowed us to uncover the most productive and impactful authors and most influential articles, identify the most recurrent authors' keywords and their longitudinal evolution, keyword co-occurrence network, multiple correspondence evolution map and country collaboration network. The information provided by such analyses permitted uncovering of the structure of the EJMBE, highlighting its latest developments and suggesting a future research agenda.

Results and discussion
Publication and citation structure of REDEE and EJMBE The trend of articles in the REDEE and EJMBE is reflected in Table 1

Contributing authors
It is fundamental to recognize the journal's structure and growth by identifying the most productive authors, institutions and countries (Donthu et al., 2021). In total, 1.042 authors published their work in REDEE and EJMBE. Table 2 reveals the top 10 most productive authors and their impact. The analysis considered the 1.042 authors who published in REDEE and EJMBE. G azquez-Abad, J., V azquez-Casielles, R. and Camis on-Zornoza, C. are the most prolific authors, with four articles each. It is interesting to acknowledge that Professor Camis on-Zornoza published four articles between 2008 and 2009, an average of two papers per year. Among the top 10 most productive authors, Universidad de Almeria is the most represented affiliation, with two authors (G azquez-Abad, J.; Cruz-Rambaud, S.) and seven papers. In an editorial note published in 2015, the Editors Barroso and Bign e (2015) stated multiple measures to facilitate the publication of relevant and rigorous papers. One of   Table by authors  Table 2.
Top 10 most productive authors and author's impact* EJMBE them was stimulating authors to publish in English to reflect a new internationalization approach. In 2016, Bigne (2016) reinforced this interest by changing the journal's name from REDEE to EJMBE, assuming the commitment previously stated to internationalize the journal. Since these changes are recent, it is understandable that most of the documents published were from Spanish authors and affiliations before they were applied. However, in the list, there are already two non-Spanish institutions, namely, the Abu Dhabi School of Management from the United Arab Emirates and Universidade NOVA de Lisboa from Portugal.
The number of citations is fundamental to acknowledging the articles' impact (Donthu et al., 2021). According to this metric, it is possible to recognize the most EJMBE impactful author. Barrena-Mart ınez, J., L opez-Fern andez, M. and Romero-Fern andez, P.M., were the authors with the highest number of citations (85) among the most impactful. This result derives from the work entitled "Corporate social responsibility: Evolution through institutional and stakeholder perspectives," published by the three authors ( Barrena-Mart ınez et al., 2016). The fourth most cited author was Curras-P erez, R., with 84 citations from two papers (S anchez-Garc ıa and Curras-Perez, 2019; Stojanovic et al., 2018). It is also interesting to acknowledge that Curras-P erez, R., Arfaoui, M and Rejeb, A.B., are the authors with the highest productivity and impact (h-index) and article performance (g-index). However, Curras-P erez, R., has the highest m-index (0.333) since its first paper was published in 2018, one year after Arfaoui, M. and Rejeb, A.B.

Most influential articles
The number of citations is fundamental to understanding the articles' research impact (Donthu et al., 2021) and how they shape future research (Purkayastha et al., 2019;Singh et al., 2022). The journal's most impactful articles are identified through the analysis of TC. The top 10 most impactful documents are represented in Table 3. These documents contributed to 21.66% of the total number of citations. The most cited work is from Barrena-Mart ınez et al.   (Bornmann and Marx, 2015). This metric helps mitigate the impact of a publication with more citations than a recent one (Rahaman et al., 2022). The work by Arag on-S anchez et al. (2015) has the highest normalized total citations (5.14), while the work by Bianchi et al. (2019) has the highest average total citations per year (14.20). These results highlight the relevance of these studies among those published in EJMBE using metrics other than TC.
Author's keywords The analysis of the author's keywords represents a way to understand the core topic of a research article (Su and Lee, 2010) and explore the existing and future relationships in EJMBE. A total of 2,028 keywords occurred in the 454 analyzed documents. The most prominent keywords that occurred at least ten times were innovation (n 5 26), performance (n 5 22), trust (n 5 15), satisfaction (n 5 14) and entrepreneurship (n 5 10). These findings confirm the journal's aim to publish research related to business economics. Analyzing the Top 10 keywords, one is associated with the research context (i.e. performance), five with a body of literature (e.g. entrepreneurship or corporate governance) and four is related to theoretical concepts (e.g. trust or satisfaction). In total, these five keywords represent 4.29% of the total. Table 4 depicts the most frequent authors' keywords. Figure 2 highlights the authors' keywords evolution to reveal the journal's longitudinal interest. This analysis allows us to explore the existence of the future interests of EJMBE (Donthu et al., 2021). Innovation, the most recurrent keyword, had a steady representation in the first eight years, with 19 hits. This result suggests the interest of EJMBE in publishing articles related to innovation in their first years. The 19 articles published using this keyword represent 73% of the total. The remaining seven (27%) were published after 2014. In turn, the CSR keyword has prominence (seven times out of nine) in the second half of the analyzed period (2015/2022), showing a trend. This result suggests the relevance of CSR for the Business Economics research area. In particular, CSR has been a requirement for companies to meet environmental pressures and improve competitiveness (Barrena-Mart ınez et al., 2016). In 2022, innovation was the sole keyword referred to, which by the way, has been losing relevance over the years. These results may suggest a shift in research trends published in EJMBE. Figure 3 highlights the author's keyword co-occurrence network. This analysis establishes the relationship and maps the conceptual structure of the articles published (Eduardsen and Marinova, 2020) in REDEE and EJMBE, reflecting their relevance to the journal. It suggests the thematic relationship between the authors' keywords and the published articles (Wang et al., 2012). It makes a conceptual contribution to analyzing the top 10 most recurring keywords (  Table by authors   Table 4. Top 10 recurrent authors' keywords EJMBE size of the edge represents the frequency that a keyword occurs, and the thickness of the line between two-point size edges indicates the keyword's frequency co-occurrence. Confirming the results of Table 4, the point-size edges with the greater dimension are innovation, performance and satisfaction. The keywords in the same color represent a cluster. For instance, organizational learning, organizational performance, transformational leadership and shared vision (brown color) reveal a theme significantly interconnected. The lines between the edges of trust, satisfaction, commitment and loyalty (pink color) suggest that these theoretical concepts are pivotal to relationship marketing and a relevant topic for EJMBE. Relationship marketing is a competitive strategy aiming to create, maintain and Structure of REDEE and EJMBE research develop successful customer relationships (Mahmoud et al., 2018). Trust, satisfaction, commitment and loyalty are fundamental to establishing such relationships (Simões Coelho et al., 2022;Furtado et al., 2022;Moro et al., 2020). Innovation and performance are concepts strongly linked to entrepreneurship (red color). Innovative entrepreneurship is the basis for economic development, fundamental to achieving and maintaining success (Block et al., 2017;Garc ıa-Rodr ıguez et al., 2017). Also, firm performance is critical for survival, growth, or turn profitability. It is a guide to meeting the firm's objectives, such as profit or positive cash flow (Brownell et al., 2021;Rico and Cabrer-Borr as, 2019).

Multiple correspondence analysis evolution map
Multiple correspondence analysis permits the creation of a conceptual structure for the documents published in the REDEE and EJMBE. K-means clustering acknowledges the documents with common concepts (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017), examining the relationship between the authors' keywords and creating a conceptual map. Through the graphical representation of the data through a homogeneity analysis of the indicator matrix (Gifi, 1990), it is possible to understand the interdependence among a set of variables, identifying new latent variables. Figure 4 shows that the publications in the REDEE and EJMBE are classified into two clusters, showing the intellectual structure of the journal in the past seventeen years. For instance, in the red cluster, the keywords competitive advantage, stakeholder theory, firm performance and CSR reveal that these are used simultaneously in multiple documents. Since these keywords are close to the middle of the map, they represent the core of the research field developed in the journal. In turn, the keywords Perceived Risk and Transformational Leadership are far from each other, suggesting that few articles studied perceived risk in transformational leadership.

Country collaboration network
The social structure reveals the relationship and collaboration between authors from different countries ( Figure 5) in the analyzed years. Scholars' collaboration can lead to  (Crane, 1977). Identifying the countries from which REDEE and EJMBE authors are affiliated reveals the intensity of the journal's internationalization. It can encourage new research projects among researchers from unrepresented countries (Donthu et al., 2021). In 2016, EJMBE started an international journey (Bigne, 2016). To highlight the international path, the country collaboration world map among REDEE and EJMBE authors is presented in Figure 5. Additionally, the top five country collaborations are revealed. The author's affiliation country was used as a proxy to acknowledge the authors' nationality (Aria et al., 2021), and only papers in which the collaboration between authors from different nationalities was considered. The blue colors represent the authors' countries, and the color tone reveals the frequency of collaborations. Through the analysis, a growing international trend started since the foundation of EJMBE. The international collaborations of REDEE (world map on the left; nine articles) showed a lower collaboration rate. In turn, EJMBE (world map on the right; 57 articles) showed a radical increase in international collaborations. Since 2016, the collaboration network has spread worldwide. The collaboration network involves

Conclusions
This study performed a bibliographic analysis aiming to identify the footprint left by REDEE and EJMBE that made the journal recognized as it is nowadays. As the number of academic studies published in REDEE and EJMBE is increasing rapidly, it is vital to create a sustainable evolution, helping researchers align their focus and meet the journal's aim (Cortez et al., 2018;Moro et al., 2017). Examining the past, present and future of EJMBE research was needed. Hence, this study developed an overview of the studies published in REDEE and EJMBE between 2006 and 2021. The results highlighted that many researchers publish in this journal, showing diversity, especially since the EJMBE foundation.
The bibliometric analysis results indicate a steadily growing number of publications since 2015. The year with the highest number of publications was 2021 (46). Additionally, since 2014, the number of citations has increased significantly, as 66% of the journal's citations were from 2014 to 2019. This output led the journal from a Scopus Quartile 3 (Q3) in the subject area of Business and International Management to an outstanding Scopus Quartile 1 (Q1) in 2019. Simultaneously, these results reflect their relevance and impact on EJMBE. The contribution of Barrena-Mart ınez et al. (2016), Kamazak (2017 and Stojanovic et al. (2018) was fundamental, as they were the most cited papers.
The result from the analysis of the most contributing authors revealed that the most prolific authors (i.e. more articles) were G azquez-Abad, J., Universidad de Almeria, Spain (n 5 4), followed by V azquez-Casielles, R., Universidad de Oviedo, Spain (n 5 4). The third most productive author was Camis on-Zornoza, C., Universidad Jaume I, Spain (n 5 4). These results demonstrate the diversity of authors publishing in the EJMBE. Among the 988 EJMBE authors who published in the REDEE and EJMBE, only three published four articles in the 16 years of analyzed publications. These three authors represent 0.4% of the total. Among the top 10 most productive authors (see Table 2), it is possible to acknowledge that all the authors are based in Spain. These results are understandable since changes occurred in the journal only more recently. In 2015, REDEE changed its direction by stimulating authors to publish in English instead of Spanish (Barroso and Bign e, 2015), starting the process of internationalization. In 2015, a step forward was taken by changing the Spanish REDEE designation to EJMBE (Bigne, 2016), an international designation. Due to these recent changes, it is understandable that the most prolific authors still have a Spanish affiliation. Due to the internationalization dynamic that started in 2015 (see Figure 5), these results are expected to change in the following years.
An analysis of the authors' keywords demonstrated the topics that are getting the attention of the EJMBE. Since 2014, the authors have most mentioned the CSR keyword. The keyword co-occurrence analysis (see Figure 3) and the conceptual structural map (see Figure 4) confirmed this result. They suggested that the topic relates to purchasing intention, firm performance, stakeholder theory and reputation. Implementing CSR actions includes the systemic analysis of the environment. From this point of view, the stakeholder theory is critical. The stakeholder theory refers to the effort to establish a positive multilateral relationship among involved parties. This implies achieving sustainable economic development, establishing a connection between employees, the local community and society, and improving the quality of life of others (Barrena-Mart ınez et al., 2016). These efforts will promote a positive reputation and stimulate the customers' purchase intentions (Baah et al., 2021;Bianchi et al., 2019). Additionally, relationship marketing and the relation between innovation, performance and entrepreneurship are topics of interest for the journal (C anovas-Saiz et al., 2020; Guei, 2022;Rico and Cabrer-Borr as, 2019).
In summary, three significant implications can be taken from the research topics which received the most attention from the authors who published in EJMBE during the analyzed period. First, innovation is a critical requirement if one wishes to embark on entrepreneurship endeavors (Rehman et al., 2023), which is strongly connected with performance; however, this theme was more emphasized in 2006-2014. On the contrary, CSR achieved prominence between 2014 and 2021, with researchers often using stakeholder theory (e.g. Salam and Ali, 2020) and stressing CSR's influence on purchase intention, firm performance and reputation. Second, concepts like satisfaction, trust, commitment and loyalty were frequently the focus of attention of papers encapsulated by the relationship marketing paradigm (Pinto and Brandão, 2020).
The aims and scope of EJMBE are well formulated, aligned with the name of the journal, at the core of the business and management arena, and matching key subject areas and categories as defined by Scopus, such as business and international management, marketing, organizational behavior and human resources management, strategy and management, finance. Nevertheless, the journal could improve its positioning by developing successful strategies embracing future lines of research or special issues emphasizing the interface between management and information technology. This novel approach could cover hot topics such as digital and social media analytics and social network analysis for business, data science for management and big data analytics, knowledge management and business intelligence, social network intelligence and cybersecurity (Jakubik and M€ u€ ursepp, 2022;Kumar and Mallipeddi, 2022;Mariani et al., 2022).
Social media has given businesses a previously unheard-of opportunity to communicate with customers in real-time and access uncharacteristically large and rich consumer information that may be used to revolutionize their business and marketing strategies (Kumar and Sharma, 2022;Stojanovic et al., 2018). Social media analytics can be envisaged as a multidisciplinary strategy that integrates text mining, social network analysis and data mining to allow firms to take advantage of techniques like sentiment analysis, topic modeling, social network analysis and influencer identification (Ramos et al., 2019Rita et al., 2022). Social network analysis enables companies to think about network problems and extract valuable and practical information for various applications, utilizing network science that offers a complete set of approaches, with applications such as personalized targeting and influencer detection (Fuentes-Medina et al., 2018;Rita et al., 2020).
Data science for management uses interdisciplinary methods such as data visualization, database systems and machine learning (Han and Trimi, 2022) to find novel, practical and clear patterns in data. These methods are used to analyze and prepare data to build analytical models, like data characterization/description, recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) value, or association rules (for example, market basket analysis). Big data analytics highlights business challenges brought on by the big data ecosystem's complexity and diversity (Modic et al., 2019;Naeem et al., 2022).
Knowledge management is also a cornerstone area of research since many of the conventional sources of competitive advantage are being swept away by the consequences of digital transformation and other globalizing forces (Machado et al., 2022;Qadri et al., 2021). Business intelligence focuses on procedures giving managerial decision-supporting capabilities (Gupta et al., 2022). Furthermore, social network intelligence addresses the management of social networks, geographic information and technological data, information and knowledge. Finally, cybersecurity covers the function of information and the safety of such information within social and organizational contexts (Kumar and Mallipeddi, 2022).
Although the study gives a complete overall picture of the published documents between 2006 and 2021, it has some limitations. First, the search scope was restrained to the Scopus database. However, every scientific database has limitations (Falagas et al., 2008). Second, the present study was limited to the years between 2006 and 2021. The REDEE was founded in 1991, and to depict the entire history and the general overview of the journal, it would be essential to consider all the documents. The lack of information restrained our scope since the documents published before 2006 are not publicly available. Third, there are 129 documents published that are not indexed in the Scopus Database. This implies limitations in terms of the number of citations. Tables 2-4 should be analyzed considering this limitation. Fourth, recent years have had higher results since it is possible to disseminate the author's work easier than before, resulting, for instance, in a higher number of citations among the scientific community. Although these limitations should be considered, this bibliometric analysis uncovers a general overview of the published documents and identifies the most relevant information published in REDEE and EJMBE.