FORECASTING THE NUMBER OF PUBLICATIONS OF PAPERS ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN ACADEMIC JOURNALS

Research on entrepreneurship has been growing very rapidly. The question of how long this growth process would continue may be very important to those involved in research and education on entrepreneurship. The objective of this paper is to forecast publications of papers on entrepreneurship in academic journals. Through this forecasting, we attempt not only to forecast publications of papers on entrepreneurship but also to shed light on the growth process of research on entrepreneurship. For research data, this research used online web databases. Using the data from the databases, we constructed a time series representing the number of papers on entrepreneurship in academic journals for the period 1961-2004. We fitted an S-shaped curve or the Fisher-Pry model to this time series data. The estimated forecast indicates that the number of papers on entrepreneurship in academic journals would grow at a accelerating rate through 2013, and the growth process would continue through 2026 at a significant rate. Then the growth rate would become marginal through 2037. Forecast indicates that after 2037 the growth may be near zero. However, the average number of publications of professional papers on entrepreneurship in years 2038-2060 would remain at a level greater than four times of that o