Small and Medium Entrepreneurship: Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Despite the high importance of small business for the development of economic systems, it faces a number of difficulties due to its size. These circumstances have attracted the attention of the scientific community. As the dynamics of the number of publications on the development of small and medium-sized enterprises shows, scientists around the world are interested in a wide range of issues. The purpose of this article was to analyze the evolution of research fronts and identify key research topics, the current knowledge base and influential publications of Russian and foreign scientists. We used the freeware product CiteSpaceV to conduct our research. To analyze the publications, we used the ISI Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) database, the selected time interval was from 1997 to 2020. As a result of this study, eight major clusters in the field of SME development were identified according to foreign publications; only one cluster was identified according to Russian publications. A comparison of research fronts on foreign publications with Russian topics can become the basis for forecasting promising research areas.