Trends in entrepreneurship education: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Purpose

This systematic literature review provides an overview of the entrepreneurship education research, by outlining the recent trends of research on entrepreneurship education. This research study has two primary goals. First one is the identification and categorization of the entrepreneurship education in scientific research by providing sequential distribution of published articles, and the research output of scientific journals, authors, and different countries. Another goal is to recognize the themes of research that are most developed and examined by the researchers.

Design/methodology/approach

This research systematically examines published scientific documents on entrepreneurship education taken from Scopus database ranging from 1950 to 2021. A total of 1,531 articles were selected for final analysis after a systematic process of elimination based on specific criteria. VOSviewer was used for bibliographic coupling, keyword co-occurrence, distance based mapping, clustering, and co-citation analysis of articles, countries, journals, and authors.

Findings

The systematic literature review revealed that in the last 15 years, scientific literature has shown a variation in direction of research in this area. The literature has moved from focusing on traditional means of entrepreneurship education towards more subtle and output-oriented factors of entrepreneurship education such as intentions, motivation, attitude, and behavior. The most popular topic among researchers and with the greater number of published papers is entrepreneurial intentions, and it is closely related to practice, innovation, and entrepreneurial learning.

Originality/value

This is one of the few systematic literature reviews on entrepreneurship education, and perhaps the only systematic review that analyzes literature on entrepreneurship education from 1950 to 2021 with VOSviewer analysis techniques.

Citation

Shabbir, M.S., Batool, F. and Mahmood, A. (2022), "Trends in entrepreneurship education: a systematic literature review", Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning, Vol. 12 No. 6, pp. 1040-1056. https://doi.org/10.1108/HESWBL-05-2022-0105