of the Academy of Management

There is an increasing number of research reviews on virtual teams, and researchers continue to probe new ways of investigating the effects of working at a distance. Yet with all this new knowledge, it is unclear what we have learned about the progress of science in the field. One way that researchers learn about a field of study like virtual teams is to review the empirical literature. But if authors tend to cite papers that are similar to their way of doing research, do we really learn anything new? How realistic, or generalizable are the results if there is no cross-fertilization of methodology? We conducted a bibliographic analysis of the virtual teams literature from 1995-2002. Our aim was to examine whether research papers on virtual teams cluster according to the type of methodology they share. A statistical testing technique, a social network analysis, and a visualization network analysis were used to test citation patterns to determine whether papers are more similar to those within the same group (i.e., same methodology) than papers from other groups (i.e., different methodology). The results show that, overall, papers using the same methodology are more similar to each other than to papers using different methodologies. There are some differences over time in that earlier papers were mostly lab experiments and later papers were mostly field studies. However, the results persist in terms of citation similarity. A discussion of the implications of our findings and for future research follows