Large-scale bibliometric review of diffusion research

Despite the fact that diffusion research has existed for more than a century, a quantitative review covering this subject in a broad and general context is still lacking. This article reviews diffusion research by providing an extensive bibliometric and clustering analysis. In total, we identified thirteen clusters comprising 6,811 publications over the period of 2002–2011, and thereby describe the characteristics of diffusion research in an extensive and general way based on quantitative bibliometric methods. The analysis reveals that diffusion research is highly interdisciplinary in character, involving several disciplines from ethnology to economics, with many overlapping research trails. The concluding section indicates that diffusion research seems to be data driven and relies heavily on solely empirical studies. Consequently, influential publications rely on empirical data that support and change theories in modest ways only. In this contribution, we propose a review method that produces a fairly good overview of the research area and which can be applied to any knowledge field to replace or complement the traditional literature review.