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The purpose of this paper is to identify the studies that have had the greatest impact on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) research and to analyze the changes that have taken place in the intellectual structure of this key topic in the entrepreneurship field.

This paper adopts the methods of citation analysis, co-citation analysis, social network analysis and factor analysis to analyze 2,005 studies on the theme of EO in the 12 years from 2008 to 2019.

The research identified the representative literature and journals in the field of EO, presented the development process and knowledge cluster by stages in the form of intuitive network mapping and summarized the main research fields and the evolutionary trend of EO during the period 2008–2019.

This study provides a more comprehensive and objective knowledge structure evolution context for EO researchers, which is conducive to the mature development of the entrepreneurship-oriented field.

It is helpful for enterprise managers to have a deeper understanding of the connotations of EO and to make more scientific entrepreneurial decisions, so as to improve their ability in enterprise innovation and entrepreneurship.

This study visualizes the evolution process of EO knowledge structure, fills the gaps of recent knowledge structure analysis literature in this field and provides theoretical support for the findings of other studies.