Measuring progress in entrepreneurship research

During the past ten years there have been significant developments in the field of entrepreneurship. Increased attention to a variety of new topics such as opportunity recognition (Eckhardt and Shane, 2003; Alvarez and Barney, 2010), growth (Delmar et al., 2003), entrepreneurial cognition (Baron, 2007), entrepreneurial orientation (Wiklund and Shepherd, 2003), venture capital (Hsu, 2004), nascent entrepreneurs (Gartner et al., 2004; Brush et al., 2008); social networks and social capital (Aldrich and Kim, 2007; Aldrich et al., 2004; Davidsson and Honig, 2003) has led to communities of scholars coalescing around these topical areas (Gartner, 2001). Since 2000, the number of entrepreneurship scholars and journals publishing entrepreneurship research has also increased dramatically. For example, in 2013 the Entrepreneurship division of the Academy of Management had 2738 registered members (Academy of Management, 2013). In 2002, Katz and Boal classified 44 English-speaking entrepreneurship journals by quality into three levels. Since then, the number has almost tripled, so that at the time of writing (2013) there are more than 116 entrepreneurship journals (http://www.slu.edu/x17970.xml). Taken together, the four top journals in the Katz and Boal (2002) classification published over 150 academic articles per year, providing entrepreneurship researchers with many opportunities to disseminate their scholarship. Notably, these journals also rose in the SSCI rankings and acceptance rates declined, indicating improved quality and impact of these journals. Clearly, the field of entrepreneurship enjoys significant growth in terms of number of topics studied, the number of scholars attracted to the field and the number of publication outlets. In sum, entrepreneurship has blossomed into a legitimate and popular field of study.