Mapping Human Resource Management: Reviewing the field and charting future directions Maria Markoulli a , Colin I.S.G. Lee b , Eliza Byington a , Will A. Felps a, ⁎ a School of Management, UNSW Business School, University of New South Wales, Australia b Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Canada article info abstract Article history: Received 3 March 2015 Received in revised form 2 October 2016 Accepted 3 October 2016 Available online xxxx Using recent advances in science mapping, this article systematically reviews the Human Re- source Management (HRM) field. We analyze 12,157 HRM research articles published over 23 years to reveal the topic content and intellectual structure of HRM scholarship. A download- able, searchable HRM topic map is provided (http://bit.ly/HR-Map) that reveals: a) 1702 HRM article topics, b) the number of articles on each topic, c) topic relations, trends, and impact, and d) five major HRM topic clusters. We discuss the overall intellectual structure of HRM scholar- ship and review the five topic clusters. Next, the topic content of HRM scholarship is compared to that of 6114 articles from the practitioner-oriented outlet HR Magazine. We identify 100 topics emphasized to a much greater degree in the practitioner-oriented literature. Seven key themes for future research that could help align HRM scholarship with the interests of HR prac- titioners are identified and discussed. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Human Resource Management Science mapping Bibliometric Research-practice gap 1. Introduction In the Human Resource Management (HRM) field, review articles typically consider only some of the “trees”, but lack the scope to provide a synthetic overview of the “forest” of HRM scholarship. In particular, HRM review articles typically focus on ex- amining the contents of a small number of articles on a specific topic or research question. As such, scholars are likely to have a fragmented and incomplete view of the field overall, which may result in research silos, redundant research efforts, and lost op- portunities for meaningful conversations between topic areas. Moreover, narrow, disconnected, and incomplete views of the HRM field can limit scholars' ability to detect research opportunities. In recent years, new alternatives to the traditional narrow review have emerged. In particular, what can be called structural reviews 1) examine the relations between topic areas, and 2) use some form of quantification to succinctly summarize a large lit- erature (Porter, Kongthon, & Lu, 2002). As Porter et al. (2002), a broad scan of a literature “can extend the span of science by bet- ter linking efforts across research domains. Topical relationships, research trends, and complementary capabilities can be discovered, thereby facilitating research projects” (p. 351). In addition, because structural reviews employ some form of quantifi- cation and objective analysis, such reviews “improve the review process by synthesizing research in a systematic, transparent, and reproducible manner” (Tranfield, Denyer, & Smart, 2003, p. 207). In doing so, structural reviews help overcome a key limitation of traditional review articles: their lack of rigor (i.e. biased, subjective, impressionistic description). Human Resource Management Review xxx (2016) xxx–xxx ⁎ Corresponding author at: School of Management, West Lobby Level 5, Office 534C, UNSW Business School building, UNSW Australia, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. E-mail addresses: m.markoulli@unswalumni.com (M. Markoulli), colin.lee@haskayne.ucalgary.ca (C.I.S.G. Lee), e.byington@unsw.edu.au (E. Byington), w.felps@unsw.edu.au (W.A. Felps). HUMRES-00571; No of Pages 30 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2016.10.001 1053-4822/© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Human Resource Management Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/humres Please cite this article as: Markoulli, M., et al., Mapping Human Resource Management: Reviewing the field and charting future directions, Human Resource Management Review (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2016.10.001