A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL

The term intellectual capital has been appeared recently in economy being debated in literature since 90s playing an important role in the economic activity of an entity of nowadays. The emerging of the "new economyâ€, mainly driven by information and knowledge, has been identified by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as the explanation lying at the base of the development of intellectual capital, a fundamental topic in business (Hornery, 1999). One way or another, intellectual capital plays a significant role in the economic, administrative, technological and social development of contemporary times, being difficult to quantify. Many researchers avoid defining intellectual capital, but consider it the basic value of an entity, as it contains non-financial and related information (Amir and Lev, 1996; Edvinsson and Malone, 1997; Stewart, 1997; Bontis, 2001). The purpose of our paper is to highlights the contributions of researchers in the field of intellectual capital as far as the published articles in the high quality journals are concerned. Our paper presents a quantitative research by performing, on one side, a content analysis of the prestigious international journals which include papers related to intellectual capital and, on the other side, a content analysis of those articles. The originality of the present article is represented by the personal contribution to the stage of knowledge in the field of intellectual capital by means of analyzing already existent researches in the field. The results of our analysis, demonstrate that the studies conducted until now are very few by comparison to the number it should have existed until now in the literature, which demonstrates that this field of research is still at its early stage