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Although the business model field of study has been a focus of attention for both researchers and practitioners within the past two decades, it still suffers from concern about its identity. Accordingly, this paper aims to clarify the intellectual structure of business model through identifying the research clusters and their sub-clusters, the prominent relations and the dominant research trends.

This paper uses some common text mining methods including co-word analysis, burst analysis, timeline analysis and topic modeling to analyze and mine the title, abstract and keywords of 14,081 research documents related to the domain of business model.

The results revealed that the business model field of study consists of three main research areas including electronic business model, business model innovation and sustainable business model, each of which has some sub-areas and has been more evident in some particular industries. Additionally, from the time perspective, research issues in the domain of sustainable development are considered as the hot and emerging topics in this field. In addition, the results confirmed that information technology has been one of the most important drivers, influencing the appearance of different study topics in the various periods.

The contribution of this study is to quantitatively uncover the dominant knowledge structure and prominent research trends in the business model field of study, considering a broad range of scholarly publications and using some promising and reliable text mining techniques.