Research Topics and Collaboration in Human Resource Development Review 2012–2021: A Bibliometrics Approach

Abstract

In celebrating HRDR’s 20 years of publication, this study aims to shed light on research trends in the journal and future research needs by examining 10 years of publications from a structural perspective. We used three complementary computational methods to find major research trends and themes including keyword network analysis, topic modeling, and bibliographic coupling. This paper presents the findings on the research themes, structural coherence, and semantic relevance based on clusters formed by normalized distance measures. Connectivity, co-appearances, and citations are important forms of scholarly communication that represent the body of knowledge in the field. Our findings indicate that research topics greatly expanded beyond the early HRD research topics of learning and development to include various topics related to diversity, critical HRD, and equity issues in organizations and society. We also examined the author-institution-keywords affiliation network and the authors-collaboration network to suggest how scholars can collaborate more in the future.