Strategic Management Journal Strat. Mgmt. J., 25: 981–1004 (2004) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/smj.397 CHANGES IN THE INTELLECTUAL STRUCTURE OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT RESEARCH: A BIBLIOMETRIC STUDY OF THE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, 1980–2000 ANTONIO-RAFAEL RAMOS-RODR ´ IGUEZ* and JOS ´ E RU ´ IZ-NAVARRO Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, University of C ´ adiz, C ´ adiz, Spain The aim of this paper is to identify the works that have had the greatest impact on strategic management research and to analyze the changes that have taken place in the intellectual struc- ture of this discipline. The methodology is based on the bibliometric techniques of citation and co-citation analysis which are applied to all the articles published in the Strategic Management Journal from its first issue in 1980 through 2000. Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ... a statistical record of ideas ... would allow us to identify the precise moment in history that ideas emerge, chronicle their growth and spread, determine the exact duration of their validity in the collective mind and afterwards trace their path towards decline, erosion into mere clich´ e and ulti- mate disappearance beyond the horizon of time. (Ortega y Gasset, 1967) INTRODUCTION Once a scientific discipline has reached a certain degree of maturity, it is common practice for its scholars to turn their attention towards the literature generated by the scientific community and, treating it as a research topic in its own right, to conduct reviews of the literature with a view to assessing the general state of the art. Normally, these types of study are considered as adopting the impressionist approach and their findings tend to reflect the subjective views of their authors. Keywords: strategic management research; bibliometrics; co-citation analysis ∗ Correspondence to: Antonio-Rafael Ramos-Rodr´ ı guez, Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, University of C´ adiz, Duque de N´ ajera 8, 11.002 C´ adiz, Spain. E-mail: rafael.ramos@uca.es The purpose of this paper is to gain an impres- sion of strategic management research and its evo- lution by considering the works of a great number of researchers in the field over an extended period of time using bibliometric methods. The aim, following the suggestion of White and McCain (1998), is to ascertain how the discipline has evolved by focusing on and describing what ap- pears, as it were, in the rear-view mirror. The term bibliometrics refers to the mathemat- ical and statistical analysis of patterns that appear in the publication and use of documents (Diodato, 1994). The techniques used in this paper are known as citation and co-citation analysis. Citation analy- sis is based on the premise that authors cite docu- ments they consider to be important in the develop- ment of their research. Therefore, frequently cited documents are likely to have exerted a greater influence on the discipline than those less fre- quently cited (Culnan, 1987; Tahai and Meyer, 1999). Similarly, co-citation analysis of documents records the number of papers that have cited any particular pair of documents and it is interpreted as a measure for similarity of content of the two documents. The approach is instrumental in iden- tifying groupings of authors, topics, or methods Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 26 February 2002 Final revision received 1 December 2003