A bibliometric review of early-stage entrepreneurial equity financing: an overview and future research agenda

Rich research on the sources of entrepreneurial capital has gradually been developed in the field of entrepreneurial equity financing. However, diverse and segmented research approaches hinder our understanding of the overall development of early-stage entrepreneurial equity financing in this context. Supplementing the previous methods for conducting research reviews and exploiting visual networks, this study uses a combination of bibliometrics and textual analysis to review the scope and evolution of early-stage entrepreneurial equity financing-related research. Our primary sample of 3,713 studies includes 108,385 secondary documents; these documents comprise the references cited by our primary sample records. We visually describe the field distribution, conceptual structure, and network connections of early-stage entrepreneurial equity financing-related publications over the 36-year period from 1987 to 2022. This paper also maps out hot topics and burgeoning trends through an analysis of the evolution of keywords in relevant publications. Our study contributes to the early-stage entrepreneurial equity financing literature by systematically reviewing the knowledge landscape in this field and identifying and articulating promising new research directions.