Sourcing research as an intellectual network of ideas

What are the current intellectual clusters in the sourcing literature? How do these clusters relate to each other? How has sourcing-related research changed over the last 10 years? We respond to these questions by examining the intellectual structure of research in the sourcing literature across 21 journals during the last decade (1998-2007). Multidimensional scaling is used to analyze cocitation data involving 72,003 citations from 1,960 sourcing articles. The results indicate that 10 different sourcing clusters emerged in the 1998-2002 period and 6 sourcing clusters surfaced in the 2003-2007 period. Five of the intellectual clusters in 1998-2002 disappeared in 2003-2007, five clusters remained, and one new cluster materialized in 2003-2007 that did not exist in the earlier period (Managerial Behavior and Upstream Decision Making).