Legitimacy in entrepreneurship. Intellectual structure and research trends

From the beginning of the xxi century, research on organizational legitimacy has been frequently used to explain the survival of new companies. The need of being considered legitimated for new companies to improve their access to necessary resources to survive has called the researchers attention. This situation has favored the increase in the research about organizational legitimacy in the entrepreneurship field, which has augmented the complexity of obtaining a global understanding of the field´s current context. The aim of this research is to identify and visualize the intellectual structure of the research and the emerging trends regarding organizational legitimacy in the entrepreneurship field. The database is made up of the sources of knowledge and references on which the scientific articles published in the data base of the Web of Science (WOS) were based. Through a bibliometric methodology based on co-citation, we identify the main research areas, the most active ones, the main contributors, dissemination paths and emerging trends in the research field. This research paper contributes to the development of organizational legitimacy in the entrepreneurship field offering a comprehensive view of the situation of this domain, a starting point as well as a theoretical base for the researchers to build new developments.