A Big-Data Approach to Understanding the Thematic Landscape of the Field of Business Ethics, 1982–2016

This study focuses on examining the thematic landscape of the history of scholarly publication in business ethics. We analyze the titles, abstracts, full texts, and citation information of all research papers published in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Business Ethics, from its inaugura...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of business ethics
Authors: Liu, Ying (Author) ; Mai, Feng (Author) ; MacDonald, Chris (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2019
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 2019, Volume: 160, Issue: 1, Pages: 127-150
Further subjects:B Thematic landscape
B quantitative content analysis
B Probabilistic topic modeling
B Latent thematic structure
B Topic diversity
B Historical Review
B Intellectual structure
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:This study focuses on examining the thematic landscape of the history of scholarly publication in business ethics. We analyze the titles, abstracts, full texts, and citation information of all research papers published in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Business Ethics, from its inaugural issue in February 1982 until December 2016—a dataset that comprises 6308 articles and 42 million words. Our key method is a computational algorithm known as probabilistic topic modeling, which we use to examine objectively the field’s latent thematic landscape based on the vast volume of scholarly texts. This “big-data” approach allows us not only to provide time-specific snapshots of various research topics, but also to track the dynamic evolution of each topic over time. We further examine the pattern of individual papers’ topic diversity and the influence of individual papers’ topic diversity on their impact over time. We conclude this study with our recommendation for future studies in business ethics research.
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10551-018-3806-5