A bibliometric review of scientific theory in futures and foresight: A commentary on Fergnani and Chermack 2021

We very much welcome the publication of Fergnani and Chermack (2021) as it makes an important contribution to the development of the foresight discipline. The important role of scientific theories in social science and across all disciplines has been reflected for decades (see, e.g., Parsons, 1938). With scientific theories, researchers can link the abstract world (the world of concepts/ideas) and the concrete world (the empirical/observable world) (Chibucos et al., 2005). It is, therefore, more than appropriate to question along with Fergnani and Chermack (2021, p. 1) and colleagues, “why the field of futures and foresight has not been successful at becoming part of the social scientific establishment”? The lack of a theoretical grounding in futures and foresight studies (FFS) has been mentioned and critically discussed by several authors (Hideg, 2007; Marien, 2010; Mermet et al., 2009; Öner, 2010; Piirainen & Gonzalez, 2015). With their recent conceptual analysis, Fergnani and Chermack (2021) build upon their observation and derive argumentative explanations as well as propose recommendations for further evolution in the scientific domain. They underline that “weak theoretical foundations prevent the field from becoming a recognized academic discipline of study in the academic establishment” (Fergnani & Chermack, 2021, p. 1). We have made similar observations in our own studies of the foresight field. However, despite some bibliometric analyses of the futures research domain in general (see, e.g., Fergnani, 2019) and various focused analyses of selected techniques (see, e.g., Flostrand et al., 2020), no such examination of scientific theory in FFS exists. Our commentary supports the underlying observations by Fergnani and Chermack (2021) by adopting a brief bibliometric lens on 50 years of cumulative scholarship (1973–January 2021) in 22 selected journals. These 22 journals include a total of 47,049 articles that were scanned. Based on our search criteria, we found 151 article matches (only 0.32 percent), of which a subset of 28 articles applied scientific theories from different disciplines.

We chose the approach of bibliometric analysis, including bibliographic coupling, to measure and illustrate the resistance to scientific theory in futures and foresight. This method can be used to reconstruct the structural landscape of an academic field, which is why this approach is most appropriate for mapping research streams (Zupic & Čater, 2015). Bibliometric analysis includes the investigation of a body of literature regarding quantitative indicators such as citations, thematic associations, authorships, and geographical and institutional patterns (Ellegaard & Wallin, 2015).

A total of 151 publications were identified and subsequently analyzed with the VosViewer software (van Eck et al., 2010). We selected the articles for our review using two categories of keywords: (futures studies OR foresight OR judgemental forecasting OR judgmental forecasting OR futurology OR futurism OR anticipation OR scenario OR scenarios OR futures field) AND (theory OR theorizing OR theorising OR theoretical underpinnings). For our search, we chose Scopus as the scientific database since it provides a very comprehensive coverage compared to other databases (content coverage: over 77.8 million records, over 25,100 active titles, more than 5,000 publishers) and covers minor research areas with more detail (Martín-Martín et al., 2018). Besides, the search was limited to a handful of relevant academic journals devoted in whole or in part to FFS (in alphabetical order; including the number of listed articles in Scopus):

(1) Academy of Management Journal (1,877 articles), (2) British Journal of Management (1,247 articles), (3) California Management Review (1,822 articles), (4) European Journal of Futures Research (153 articles), (5) Foresight (931 articles), (6) Futures (4,020 articles), (7) Harvard Business Review (4,390 articles), (8) IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (2,246 articles), (9) International Journal of Forecasting (2,287 articles), (10) International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy (258 articles), (11) Journal of Forecasting (1,613 articles), (12) Journal of Futures Studies (663 articles), (13) Journal of Management (2,230 articles), (14) Long Range Planning (3,062 articles), (15) Omega (3,284 articles), (16) R&D Management (834 articles), (17) Research Policy (3,537 articles), (18) Strategic Management Journal (2,958 articles), (19) Strategy and Leadership (641 articles), (20) Technological Forecasting and Social Change (5,404 articles), (21) Technology Analysis and Strategic Management (1,442 articles), and (22) Technovation (2,150 articles).

The limitation of the journals is based on the approaches and insights of various studies in the field of FFS (see, e.g., Fergnani, 2019, Park et al., 2020, or Tiberius et al., 2020).

With our commentary, we enrich the debate on the resistance to scientific theory in futures and foresight. Our bibliometric analysis, including bibliographic illustration, complements earlier observations with distinct measures and illustrations. Furthermore, we can reveal several key findings that contribute to the conceptual analysis of Fergnani and Chermack (2021).

We confirm that compared with theorizing in other scientific disciplines, the frequency and self-conception of its use in FFS is very limited. Even though the first publications date back to 1973, most articles focus on the recent past. As a consequence, we see a concentration of publications in the field of FFS among a few authors or institutions, especially from the United Kingdom.

While there were sporadic application papers in 2007, the continuous publication of application papers in FFS can be observed only since 2011. Although the proportion of publications that apply and extend theories has increased in recent years (see Roßmann et al., 2018 or Sharma et al., 2019), most of the literature continues to deal with the topic on an analytical level (Wright et al., 2013, Wright et al., 2020 or Bootz et al., 2019 as examples). The analysis of search terms also confirms this observation. Keywords reflecting scientific theories are hardly found in the study. In contrast, keywords of futurology and synonyms are frequently presented and dominate the bibliographic coupling.

Complimentary to the analysis of Fergnani and Chermack (2021), the following thoughts are of particular interest:

Fergnani and Chermack (2021) elaborate on critical realism theory and suggest its application in FFS research. In our analysis, we could neither find an application of this theory so far nor a dominant use of another single theory. Although small in absolute numbers, we found various theories from different scientific domains being used in the field of FFS. This observation supports the general paradigm of FFS as being a meta-discipline (Bell, 2003; Slaughter, 2002) that applies various methods transdisciplinary and draws on a broad base of literature and knowledge from all the other disciplines (Blass, 2003). It is important to emphasize that for this commentary we analyzed a limited set of 22 selected journals only. Complimentary analyses could include additional journals to capture publications not published in traditional FFS journals, among them, for example, Chermack (2004) in Human Resource Development Review, Hirschinger et al. (2015) in Journal of Supply Chain Management, Wright et al. (2019) in European Journal of Operational Research or Suddendorf and Corballis (2007) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. A search for the exact terms “theory” AND “foresight” in Google Scholar reveals 303.000 hits indicating further valuable contributions across various disciplines and publications outlets. For an expanded analysis across further disciplines and publication formats, the application of a more granular review framework like TCCM (T stands for theory, C for context, C for characteristics, and M for methodology) might be beneficial (see Paul and Rosado-Serrano, 2019).