Separated by a Common Language? Entrepreneurship Research Across the Atlantic Candida G. Brush Tatiana S. Manolova Linda F. Edelman While recent inventories and assessments of the entrepreneurship field examine the focus, purpose, and methods, one area receiving less attention is the outcome or dependent variable. The outcome variable is of critical importance in scholarship, as it is a leading indicator of the cumulative nature of the scholarship in our field. This paper reviews 389 articles published over the past 3 years in four top entrepreneurship journals; two published in the United States and two published in Europe. It classifies the scholarship by theoretical underpinnings, independent variables, dependent variables, and then looks at the variation in these by origin of the journal. Results indicate that entrepreneurship researchers are using a wide variety of dependent variables, that the most popular unit of analysis is the firm, and that performance, broadly defined, is the most popular dependent variable. Implications for future research are discussed. Introduction Thomas Kuhn (1970) offered a theory of the development of scientific fields suggest- ing that they progress through identifiable stages. In most fields, these stages are charac- terized by an accumulation of reliable empirical results and the derivation of replicable tools and general principles (VanderWerf & Brush, 1989). Often there is no consensus on definition, so disagreements arise because of scholars’ roots in different disciplinary areas (Hagstrom, 1965). However, a lack of consensus is not necessarily a hindrance to achiev- ing empirical progress in a field. History shows that an emerging field often converges on a few distinct populations that are narrowed over time. After a period of accelerated research on a particular topic, the empirical field broadens again (VanderWerf & Brush, 1989). Please send correspondence to: Candida G. Brush, tel.: (781) 239-5014; fax: (781) 239-4178; e-mail: cbrush@babson.edu, to Tatiana S. Manolova at tmanolova@bentley.edu, and to Linda F. Edelman at ledelman@bentley.edu. P T E & 1042-2587 © 2008 by Baylor University 249 March, 2008