Knowledge-based intellectual structure of research in business excellence (1995–2015)

This quantitative study is meant to explore the intellectual structure paradigm of organisational business excellence (OBE) as an emerging field of research. Advanced bibliometric analysis of co-citations is performed through synchronising the relationships between the research articles published within the OBE domain. The primary objective was to develop an understanding of the field’s fundamental composition, current inward integration, outward expansion, and future research directions. The Elsevier Scopus database of journal articles was retrieved for the 1995–2015 period. Initially, descriptive analysis explored interesting findings about OBE as a distinct research domain: (1) most influential authors both in terms of the number of publications and citations; (2) most productive years for publications; (3) most productive journals. Furthermore, principal component analysis and multidimensional scaling revealed 10 main research dimensions of OBE, for example, (1) the ways of achieving OBE; (2) adoption...