Alternative equity financing instruments for entrepreneurial ventures: a bibliometric analysis of research in the last three decades

Abstract

This study aims to review scientific research in business economics related to entrepreneurial equity financing carried out in the last three decades (1984–2017) using a bibliometric analysis. To this end, 1321 documents on this topic were extracted from the Web of Science database and sorted according to the following perspectives: number of publications per year, the most cited articles, most eminent authors, journals with the highest citation per article, and countries with the highest productivity. Our research also provides clusters based on a co-occurrence analysis of keywords in order to identify the major themes investigated. Our results can be used to improve our understanding of the entrepreneurial equity financing field and identify promising research areas to further explore in the future.