Comparing citation patterns in entrepreneurship research articles in subject handbooks and Web of Science journals

Not knowing enough about the similarities or differences of citation structures between different types of publications creates problems related to whether citation maps of research fields based on Web of Science/ISI data are representative of research fields as a whole or if they are a representation of how WoS perceives the field, not the least in the humanities and the social sciences. To investigate this problem, the citation structures in entrepreneurship research were analyzed using citation data both coming out of WoS-indexed journal articles and citation data from 12 entrepreneurship research handbooks. The datasets were analyzed by studying the age of references, the co-citation structures and also, citation overlaps. The results show substantial similarities between the two data sets: the distribution of the age of the references is almost identical, the co-citation structures in form of co-citation maps have strong similarities both in terms of identifiable networks as well as which cited authors are grouped together and there is also a strong citation overlap between the two different publication types.