MAPPING THE INTELLECTUAL STRUCTURE OF MEDIA ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF RESEARCH TRENDS, THEMES, AND GLOBAL COLLABORATION (1988-2025)

Abstract

Media entrepreneurship has become a defining feature of contemporary journalism and media systems as digital technologies, platformization, and economic uncertainty reshape how media organizations are created, sustained, and legitimized. Despite rapid growth in scholarly output since the mid-2010s, research on media entrepreneurship remains fragmented across journalism studies, media management, and entrepreneurship, limiting cumulative theoretical development. This study provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of media entrepreneurship research published between 1988 and 2025 using data from the Web of Science Core Collection. Drawing on 425 peer-reviewed articles, the analysis examines publication growth, citation impact, intellectual foundations, thematic evolution, and global collaboration patterns through performance indicators and science-mapping techniques. The findings reveal a clear latent–growth–acceleration trajectory, with exponential expansion after 2014 driven by digital disruption and entrepreneurial journalism. The intellectual core of the field is anchored in entrepreneurial journalism, innovation, and social media, while media entrepreneurship as a broader managerial and ecosystem-level construct remains influential but only moderately central. Knowledge production is concentrated in a small set of journals, authors, institutions, and countries, reflecting a pronounced Global North bias. By consolidating a dispersed literature into a coherent analytical map, this study advances understanding of media entrepreneurship as a mature interdisciplinary domain and provides an evidence-based framework to guide future research, policy debates, and journalism education.