Origins and Trends of the Multinational's R&D Internationalisation Research- a Systematic Literature Review

This paper adopts bibliometric analysis on 621 literatures on multinational corporations' (MNC) R&D internationalisation from various fields to identify key patterns of this research topic. Bibliographic data of these literatures are collected from ISI Web of Knowledge with specific search criteria (e.g. from 1965 to 2013). A generic approach of bibliographic analysis is implemented to present visualised and organised results, which enable a systematic review on previous studies. We found that (1) research on internationalisation of R&D originated from three different fields, i.e., strategic management, innovation management and international business, and (2) research frontiers are emerged in most recent studies that can be categorised into four key areas. Bibliometric analysis provides a possibility to identify and understand the intellectual structure of research on R&D internationalisation in latest 35 years. Based on these findings, we analytically proposed an agenda for future studies on R&D internationalisation.CPCI-S(ISTP)CPCI-SSH(ISSHP)xl345@cam.ac.uk; xzt@pku.edu.cn; ys@cam.ac.uk597-60