Historical research on corporate governance: A bibliometric analysis

Bibliometric analysis provides historical information on research of trend and performance. A publication analysis was carried out using the related literature in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) from 1992 - 2008, collected from the web of Science databases of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Articles of such literature were concentrated on the analysis by the scientific output and distribution of subject categories and journals. The author's keywords were also analyzed to evaluate the research hotspots. The results from this analysis indicate that, yearly, production of the related scientific articles increased steadily over the investigation period and that in the year 2008, there was a peak. "Ownership structure", "board of directors" and "executive compensation" were the three most used author's keywords. In addition, the agency theory in historical corporate governance research was also discussed.