Bibliometric analysis of author collaboration in engineering management research

While many researchers would agree that the engineering management research field has been increasing in maturity since its inception due to the significant body of work published on various aspects of engineering management, this evolution has not been empirically established. The purpose of this preliminary work is to assess the development of this field by evaluating the anatomy of authorship in the field. It has been argued that examining papers published within an academic journal can provide useful information about the evolution of the underlying field. Thus, using the Engineering Management Journal (EMJ) to represent the engineering management field, bibliometric analyses are applied to the 227 papers published in the most recent ten years in the journal. Questions addressed about the field include: Who is studying these topics? To what extent are there communities of authors collaborating in research groups? How internationalized has engineering management become with respect to author location? How multi-disciplinary has the field become? These analyses will provide insight into how the field is evolving and possible future directions. This work represents the first phase of this research and the evaluation of EMJ will be extended in future work to include evaluation of other questions related to the content and research methodologies employed by papers published in EMJ.