Franchising research on emerging markets: Bibliometric and content analyses

This study reviews the franchising literature on emerging markets. We used the Bibliometrix R-package and VOSviewer software to perform a bibliometric analysis of 297 articles between 1989 and 2020 obtained from the Scopus database. We combined bibliometric coupling, historiographic citation, keyword co-occurrence, and conceptual thematic analysis, with a content analysis of the most cited articles based on total global and local citations. We identified two main research clusters: international franchising and social franchising. This article provides a deep understanding of the intellectual and conceptual structure of the academic field. It complements existing qualitative reviews and attempts at characterizations, and suggests future research directions.