Bibliometric analysis of corporate governance research in German-speaking countries: applying bibliometrics to business research using a custom-made database

The objective of the present study on corporate governance research in German-speaking countries is to portray the networks in this field, identify the central sources and actors, and establish the relations between individual subdisciplines. The present paper therefore uses bibliometric and network analysis to investigate business research literature in the leading journals in German-speaking countries. As none of the major citation databases could be used for the bibliometric analysis given the subject area under investigation, the first step was to create a bibliometric database for the planned evaluation. Using this as a basis, bibliometric evaluations were then carried out with a focus on co-citation analysis. This analysis was based on an evaluation of over 10,000 references in 267 source documents. This identified the key publications on business research in German-speaking countries that have a particularly strong influence on the subject of corporate governance. The various key areas were clustered according to similarity and visualized in a network.