Bibliometric study of the relationship between business model and air transport

With the changes in the operational environment of the air transport industry taking place, airlines are now involved in a more dynamic and complex system. However, planning a way to take into account all the current factors is only achievable with an adequate comprehension of how the current business models answer this challenge. This scenario has prompted many researchers to conduct studies related to business models and the air transport industry. This article maps the academic production in these two areas, to define the main periodicals, authors and geographic regions covered, based on a bibliometric study with qualitative indicators. From 1990 to 2012, we found nearly 19 thousand articles in the ISI Web of Knowledge and then refined the selection of relevant articles to about 500, to which we applied the same qualitative indexes. The results indicate that in the past 5 years the number of scientific articles has grown at a reasonable pace and that the authors that have published the most articles on these themes come from research centers in the United Kingdom, United States and Taiwan.