Research Topics at ISPIM : Popularity-based Scientometrics keyword analysis

This study identifies and analyses emerging innovation management research topics by applying popularity-based scientometrics analysis to ISPIM full academic papers (N=1084) from 2009 to 2014. From a research method point of view this study introduces a novel comprehensive framework for classifying scientometrics studies and proposes “Variant keyword search” – process (VKS) to overcome known synonyms and tackle the separation of multiple terms problem during the keyword harmonization process. Most of the keywords (85 percent) after the basic harmonization process occurred only once and very few are significantly more popular than others. Grounded in the VKS-process the TOP50 research topics are presented. The VKS-process appears to be a powerful tool to compress and reduce useless variation within keywords as the TOP50 list contains 68 percent of all keywords and 60 percent of unique keywords. Unsurprisingly, identified research topics in the TOP50 list can be derived from various mainstream innovation classifications