GaWC Research Bulletin 387

This Research Bulletin has been published in Globalizations, 9 (2), (2012), 195-210.

doi:10.1080/14747731.2012.658256

Please refer to the published version when quoting the paper.

(Z)

A Bibliometric Analysis of Twenty Years of Globalization Research: 1990-2009

X. Liu ^*, S. Hong ^** and Y. Liu ^***

Abstract

We present a bibliometric analysis of globalization research published during 1990–2009, based on three online library catalogues, the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index databases. Our analysis summarizes major research patterns in globalization research and could serve as an alternative and potential guide for future research in this field. The volume of books and articles on globalization has exploded since the 1990s, and there is an even distribution of globalization literature across subject categories, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of globalization research. International organizations appear as the most-cited authors in globalization research. A keyword analysis suggests that cities and networks have a central position in studies of contemporary globalization, and reveals several major strands in globalization studies.

Key words: bibliometrics, globalization, research trends, networks

INTRODUCTION

In this article, we applied bibliometric techniques to globalization research published during 1990–2009, aiming at (1) demonstrating the authorial, geographic and categorical patterns in the studies of globalizations; (2) explaining some research trends discovered from our analysis; and (3) providing an alternative and potential guide for future research.

Data and Methods

We employed two bibliometric sources to establish research patterns within globalization literature. First, we identified all books that contained the keyword ‘globali*’ in WorldCat (the world’s largest library catalogue) and the US Library of Congress online catalogue in the last 30 years. We also identified all books in the British Library online catalogue that had ‘globali*’ in their book titles. Our searching word ‘globali*’ included any word that begins with ‘globali’, such as ‘globalization’, ‘globalisation’, ‘globalizing’, and ‘globalized’. In fact, our searching term encompassed all searching terms that had been used in previous bibliometric analyses of globalization (Oswick et al., 2009; Oner et al., 2010).

Our catalogue search resulted in 6,497, 15,793, and 100,896 books in the British Library online catalogue, US Library of Congress online catalogue, and WorldCat, respectively. This catalogue data was used to reveal the general publication output on globalization. We did not analyze the contents of these books, for the following reasons: first, there were data redundancies in the catalogue data. For example, books were often treated as different records if they were translated into other languages or reprinted; second, a substantial amount of books were non-scientific works, and did not necessarily reflect the research frontier in a field. Moreover, the most-productive author in globalization, according to WorldCat, is Dr. Philip Parker, who has developed computer programs to produce more than 200,000 books; and third, research papers are more suitable to reveal the dynamics of this interdisciplinary field, as they are published at a faster rate than books. Still, research papers comprise the majority of publications in this field (Silvertsen, 2009), and contents and trends in books are usually reflected in papers through citations/quotations.

A second bibliometric source we employed was the Scientific Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) bibliographic databases, which were compiled by the Institute of Scientific Information, USA. Approximately 60–70% of social science publications (Silvertsen, 2009) are articles and bibliometric analyses based on articles could still be useful for revealing research trends in social science and humanities (Nederhof et al., 2005; Silvertsen, 2009). We consider SCI and SSCI as reliable sources for our bibliometric study, as they are the most frequently used indices in scientific output analysis (Kostoff, 2000). We assembled scholarly publications on globalization, based on bibliographic searches in the SCI and SSCI databases. The searching term ‘globali*’ was used to gather publications that contained searching words in publications’ titles, abstracts or keywords. We used this searching strategy to ensure we generated a relatively large pool of globalization-related studies. Though this searching strategy might include certain papers that merely mention ‘globali*’ in their titles, abstracts or keywords in passing, the robustness of this analysis would sustain as the bibliometric database is large enough to downplay the impacts from incorrectly included articles. Additionally, we gathered all papers that were published in two specialized journals (Global Networks and Globalizations) and special issues on globalization in SCI and SSCI-indexed journals, such as Management and Organization Review, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Business Ethics Quarterly.

Document information was then retrieved from individual documents, including author name(s), affiliation(s), subject category (ies), journal name(s), and publication title(s) and year(s). Duplicated records were eliminated. Applying the above-mentioned searching procedure, a total of 21,843 globalization publications were located in the SCI and SSCI database.

In the following sections, we present results from a bibliometric analysis that demonstrated research trends in globalization studies from the following aspects: scholarly output, major subject categories and most-active journals, most-productive and most-cited authors, geographic distribution of publications across countries, and keywords analysis. In comparison, previous bibliometric or meta-analysis of globalization research often utilized smaller bibliometric sources and adopted a limited set of bibliometric analyses (Oswick et al., 2009).

Results and Discussions

Research Output

There has emerged a clear interest in globalization research since the 1990s, although a few globalization studies were published previously (Figure 1). For example, the earliest document on globalization in the SCI and SSCI databases was published in 1966. The volume of books on globalization in WorldCat and the US Library of Congress online catalogue continually grew during 1980–2009; it started to increase significantly in the year of 1995, and exploded in the past two decades. This trend coincided with a series of events that facilitated globalization in the last two decades, including the growth of multinational enterprises and a global supply chain (Sassen, 2001); the fall of the Iron Curtain, and consolidation of economic zones such as the European Union; the deployment of low-cost communication and internet in the 1990s; and the emergence of new types of business that facilitate the circulation of people, materials and information, such as out-sourcing and in-sourcing.

However, our analysis of catalogue data suggested a trend that was different from a previous analysis that only utilized the British Library online catalogue (Oswick et al., 2009).  Oswick’s study, as well as our analysis, suggested that the volume of books on globalization peaked around 2002 and declined afterwards in the British Library online catalogue. This pattern led previous studies (Oswick et al., 2009) to conclude that globalization is a ‘fad’ word (Abrahamson, 1991), which is characterized by ‘a rapid upsurge in popularity, a leveling out of interest and then decline as it is superseded by another fad’ (Oswick et al., 2009). This was contradictory to patterns revealed by WorldCat and the US Library of Congress online catalogue. We noticed that the search in the British Library online catalogue allowed us to identify books containing ‘globali*’ in their titles, whereas search in the other two catalogues located books that used ‘globali*’ as keywords. The latter searching method generates a more comprehensive pool of literature and provides a better image of the development of globalization studies. This difference could well be the source of misjudgment on globalization being a ‘buzzword’ in other studies (Abrahamson, 1991; Oswick et al., 2009).

Figure 1: The growth of published books on globalizations in three online catalogues

Table 1: Major bibliometric descriptors for globalization research for the period of 1990–2009

We summarize major bibliometric descriptors based on the SCI and SSCI databases for the period of 1990 to 2009 in Table 1. The growing collaboration index indicated that globalization studies progressively involved more scientific collaborations, although this growth rate was less than collaboration indices documented in natural sciences (for example, Chiu and Ho, 2007; Tian et al., 2008; Zhang et al., 2010). Examples of the expansion of the knowledge repository of this field also included the increasing number of citations and references. These major bibliometric descriptors reflected growing scientific production and research collaboration in this field, indicating a substantial growth within globalization literature.

Subject Categories and Major Journals

An even distribution of globalization literature across different subject categories was revealed by our analysis (Table 2). Published globalization research was found in 219 ISI-identified subject categories in the SCI and SSCI databases. None of these 219 subject categories accounted for more than 10% of the total publications, whereas bibliometric analyses of other fields usually identify several major subject categories. This even distribution of literature reflects the interdisciplinary nature of globalization research.

Table 2: The 20 major subject categories in globalization research

Articles on globalization appeared in 2,600 journals, and the top 20 most-productive journals are summarized in Table 3, along with the number of papers that individual journals published and the number of citations to these articles. There was a concentration of globalization publication in the most-active journals, as the top 20 journals (0.77% of the total 2600 journals) published 13.6% of the total globalization research. Global Networks and Globalizations ranked top two, as we included all papers from these two journals in our bibliometric database. The average citation rate of one journal for publishing globalization studies could be the most direct measure for assessing the journal’s impact in a field and was defined as the ratio between the total number of citations to globalization publications and the total number of publications in that journal. Globalization articles that were published in these journals had generally received more citations than the impact factors of these journals (Table 3), which suggested that these journals have drawn more attention by publishing globalization articles. We understand that these citation rates are not directly comparable to journals’ ISI impact factors that are computed within a two-year window after publication. Nevertheless, we should note that the study of globalization is interdisciplinary and covers a wide range of fields. Therefore, some journals that are listed as top journals in our analysis would not be familiar to researchers in another field, and the standard for high average citation rate could vary across different fields.

Table 3: The 20 most-active scholarly journals in globalization research

Most-prolific and Most-cited Authors

Important authors in globalization were identified in two ways. First, the most prolific authors were identified by counting authors’ signatories in the 13,296 globalization articles. Second, using CiteSpace (Chen, 2004), we analyzed the 556,282 references in these 13,296 articles to find the most-cited authors in globalization studies. The analysis of the most-productive authors suggested that a small group of active authors produced a substantial amount of publications: among the 17,595 authors who (co)authored at least one globalization article, 14,623 (83.11%) contributed only one article. The most-productive author identified from globalization research in the SCI and SSCI databases was Taylor PJ with 33 articles. Other prolific authors included Beck U with 19, Derudder B with 18, and Wei YHD with 18 articles. We present the article output descriptors of the 25 most-productive authors in Table 4. We noticed the impact of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) network (Hall and Pain, 2006), as four GaWC reseachers (Taylor, Derudder, Sassen, and Beaverstock) were listed in this top 25 list. This suggested that the study of cities in globalization has become one of the major sub-fields in globalization research. We need to admit that this list of prolific authors is by no mean exhaustive, as authors could have other publication outlets such as monographs. International organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Health Organization (WHO), appeared on the list of most-cited authors, which suggested that reports, publications and data produced by these organizations serve as solid bases for globalization research2. In addition, Sassen S, Beck U and Robertson R were listed as both most-prolific and most-cited authors. This list of most-cited authors implicitly suggests that many books were seminal in this interdisciplinary field, e.g. Sassen’s Global Cities (Sassen, 2001), and Castells’s The Rise of Network Society (Castells, 1996). The fact that books were well cited by papers suggests that (1) books were important publication outlets in social sciences (as we discussed previously, books generally comprise 30–40% of the publications in the social sciences); and (2) contents and trends in books were ‘reflected’ in papers through citations/quotations, which could in turn be revealed by our bibliometric analysis.

Table 4: The 25 most-productive and most-cited authors

We also identified the most-cited articles in our database, and publications that are being cited most frequently by articles in our database. Among the globalization-related studies in the SCI and SSCI databases, the most-cited articles (along with their authors, publication year, subject categories, and citation counts) included ‘The globalization of markets’ (Levitt, 1993; Business/Management; 436 times), ‘Neoliberalizing Space’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002; Geography; 389), ‘Globalization and the Inequality of Nations’ (Krugman and Venables, 1995; Economics; 353), ‘Neo-Marshallian Nodes in Global Networks’ (Amin and Thrift, 1992; Geography/Planning and Development/Urban studies; 305), ‘Location, Competition, and Economic Development: Local Clusters in a Global Economy’ (Porter, 2000; Economics/Planning and development/Urban studies; 261), and ‘The Limits to Globalization: Technology, Districts and International Trade’(Storper 1992; Economics/Geography; 185). We noted that our counts of citations were by no means complete, as ISI only counted citations from and references to SCI and SSCI indexed journals, i.e. citations from non-SCI journals were not counted. In comparison, publications (along with their authors, publication year and citation counts) that are most frequently cited by the articles in our bibliometric database included The Consequences of Modernity (Giddens, 1990; 374 citation counts), Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Held, 1999; 368), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Harvey, 1989; 345), The Rise of the Network Society (Castells, 1996; 316), and Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Hirst and Thompson, 1996; 288. Again, the citations here only included citations that were from SCI/SSCI-indexed journals, and these publications could well be cited by other journals, reports, or online materials.

Geographic Distribution of Publications

We produced the distribution of publications across different countries, based on the authors’ affiliations. The 25 most-productive countries/territories in globalization research are listed in Table 5, summarizing the number of total publications, single-country authored articles, and internationally collaborated articles. We noticed that the geographic distribution of globalization research was not globalized and demonstrated an Anglo-American impact: out of these 25 countries/territories, 13 were from Europe, 2 were from North America, 1 was from South America, 6 were from Asia, 2 were from Oceania, and only 1 was from Africa.

Table 5: The 25 most-productive countries/territories in globalization research

The United States led the productivity ranking of countries, and produced the most single-country (3,385) and internationally collaborated articles (781). TWe also noticed that Hong Kong, as a special administrative area of China, has produced a substantial amount of globalization research, the number of which is on par with that of mainland China. Despite the fact that the volume of both single-country and internationally collaborated articles increased during our study period, the percentage of single-country articles constantly decreased. This temporal evolution suggests that the globalization research was becoming more internationally connected, and was consistent with our previous observation on the increasing collaboration index.

Keywords Analysis

A keyword analyses were performed to demonstrate the trends in globalization research. As keywords reflect the topics of individual papers, an analysis of the patterns of keywords should be informative about the development of research topics. We understand that future research questions are derived from theoretically led insights and empirically led quest, and bibliometric analysis itself does not necessarily give rise to emerging topics. Keyword analyses should, however, still reflect the development of topics in the past, identify the relative importance of topics at the current stage, and ‘guestimate’ the future evolution of research trends. As mentioned previously, our database could include certain articles that merely mention ‘globali*’ in passing, whereas keyword analyses should focus on the essential topics and help to minimize the impact of these incorrectly included articles.

We performed a keyword analysis based on author keywords and ‘keywords plus’ (Chiu and Ho, 2007; Xie et al., 2008) in these 13,296 articles (Table 6). The author keywords were part of research articles and were provided by the authors, whereas the other group of keywords used in our analysis (the keywords plus) were a series of keywords that were generated by ISI based on information about individual papers’ citation and references patterns (Garfield, 1990). For simplicity, author keywords and keywords plus were both termed keywords in the following analysis.

Table 6: The rankings of the most frequently used keywords for the periods of 1995–1999, 2000–2004 and 2005–2009

The 13,296 articles had 23,545 unique keywords, which had 74,171 occurrences. However, 17,056 (72.4%) out of these 23,545 keywords appeared once, whereas 22,594 (95.96%) keywords appeared in less than 10 papers. We present the 40 most frequently used keywords and their frequency ranking at 5-year intervals during 1995–2009 in Table 6. During this period, these 40 (0.1%) of the 23,545 keywords appeared 13,290 times and thus accounted for 17.92% of the total keyword occurrences. The frequency of keywords and their ranks followed a power-law distribution (Reed, 2001): there is a small group of keywords that are widely used, while most keywords are not frequently employed. This power-law distribution has also been discovered in other bibliometric studies (Li et al., 2009).

Our search terms in the data retrieval process, ‘globalization’ and ‘globalisation’, ranked top among these 40 most frequently used keywords. However, ‘globalization’ was used far more often than ‘globalisation’ as a keyword, which reflects the dominance of American spelling. This terminological preference was also consistent with the fact that the US produced most publications in this field.

We could discern the nation-state tradition in globalization research from the top ranked keywords. Individual countries such as United States, China, and India were listed among the top keywords, whereas ‘state’ and ‘countries’ ranked 4th and 23rd respectively. Our analysis also suggested a decline in ranks of the ‘old powers’ in terms of scholarly attentions, as ‘United States’ dropped from 3rd to 14th during 1995–2009. In the meantime, we could also perceive that ‘new powers’ are becoming focus in research areas, as the ranking of ‘China’ and ‘India’ gained substantial increases. This redistribution of the world’s power has been confirmed by previous studies. For example, city-level analysis suggested the rise of Asia-Pacific cities and the repositioning of Western cities (Pereira and Derudder, 2010; Taylor et al., 2010).

Global networks are major dimensions of contemporary globalization, as Castells claimed: “Networks are the fundamental stuff of which new organizations are and will be made” (Castells, 1996). The social, economic, political and cultural networks among individuals, organizations, and countries, sustains the development of our society. A fair understanding of global networks is crucial for solving the emerging issues in globalization (Holton, 2008). The importance of networks in globalization was also reflected in our keywords ranking, as ‘networks’ and ‘network’ ranked 13th and 229th on the keywords ranking. ‘Migration’, as one the major generators of international flows of people, also ranked high (12th) (Findlay et al., 2003).

Although globalization involves many dimensions of our society, political and economic globalizations are central in contemporary globalizing processes. This was reflected by the fact that 5 out of the top 10 keywords were related to politics and economics: ‘politics’, ‘trade’, ‘policy’, ‘growth’, and ‘governance’ ranked 2nd, 5th, 6th, 7th and 9th, respectively. It is particularly true that political and economic variables are decisive in any attempt to understand globalization (Friedmann, 1986). This is also consistent with our previous finding that economics and political sciences were among the major categories of globalization research. Interestingly, keywords related to the change of our physical environment, i.e. global environmental changes, had not gained high rankings in our list. As there is another ‘global environmental change’ literature, there needs to be synergies and integrations of studies on globalization and global environmental changes (Leichenko and O'Brien, 2008).

‘State’, ‘firm’, and ‘city’ ranked among our top list, which was consistent with the fact that firm, city, and nation are three important factors in globalization (Sassen, 2001; Taylor, 2004). For example, cities were deemed as base points of contemporary globalization and networked society and multinational firms played vital roles in forming our increasingly connected global community (Castells, 1996). Therefore, we also identified the number of publications with focus on city, nation, and firm, respectively. Three sets of searching words were used to refine our previous bibliographic search of globalization literature: ‘cities’ or ‘city’ or ‘urban*’ or ‘metro*’ were used to find city-centered globalization studies; ‘nation’ or ‘state’ or ‘country’ or ‘countries’ were employed to find globalization research on nation-state; and ‘firm’ or ‘corporat*’ or ‘compan*’ were adopted to locate articles on firms in globalization. We then plotted out the temporal evolution of volumes of articles on individual topics (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The growth of globalization research on nations, cities, and firms in the SCI and SSCI databases

Figure 2 seems to suggest that nation-centered studies were more prevalent than firm and corporation research. There is no doubt that globalizations deal with border-crossing issues, and thus have a nation-state focus. However, the volume of nation-centered globalization research might be inflated for three reasons: first, there is a paucity of sub-national data, and many researchers may only be able to employ nation-level statistics provided by organizations such as the World Bank and the UN. This is consistent with previous observation that the World Bank and the UN were listed as most-cited authors in globalization research. Second, a number of studies on inter-national and trans-national affairs use ‘globalization’ and ‘internationalization’ interchangeably. Third, analyses of firms and cities were usually positioned with national backgrounds.

Another important strand of globalization revealed in our keywords analysis was the knowledge economy. ‘Innovation’ (15th), ‘industry’ (19th), and ‘technology’ (20th) propel the development of our economies, whereas ‘knowledge’ (25th) and ‘education’ (33rd) determine individuals’, corporations’, and nations’ ability to innovate and develop new technology, which in turn is vital for sustainability and competition in this new century. Social and culture issues were also important in globalization studies, with ‘culture’, ‘gender’, and ‘identity’ ranked 16th, 22nd, and 25th, respectively. International division-of-labor is a major outcome of globalization, and is closed associated with keywords such as ‘labor’ (38th) and ‘market’ (39th).

Conclusions

Here is a summary of major findings from our bibliometric analysis:

• There was an even distribution of globalization literature across different subject categories, indicating the interdisciplinary nature of globalization research.

• The five most common categories were economics, geography, sociology, political science, and planning and development.

• International organizations appeared on the list of most-cited authors, which suggests that reports and data produced by these organizations were a solid knowledge repository of globalization research.

• The US attained a leading position in globalization research by contributing the largest share of single-country and internationally collaborated articles.

• A keyword analysis found a terminological preference on ‘globalization’, suggested networks’ central position in studies of contemporary globalization, and revealed several major strands in globalization studies.

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NOTES

^* Xingjian Liu, Department of Geography, University of  Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UK, email: xl306@cam.ac.uk

^** Song Hong, School of Resource and Environmental Science, Wuhan University, China

^*** Yaolin Liu, School of Resource and Environmental Science, Wuhan University, China, email: yaolin610@163.com

1. Records in the SCI/SSCI databases were categorized as one of the thirty-two (32) ISI document types. A list of all document types can be found on ISI websites.

2. Researchers cite works from these organizations in their peer-reviewed work. However, these citations themselves do not mean the references have been peer-reviewed.