Female Entrepreneurship has gained interest over the last 20 years. Therefore, this paper analyses 7,320 articles of the research field ‘women in entrepreneurial context’ published in 885 journals. The sample is analyzed by using a machine learning and text mining based methodological approach. Aiming to provide a broad overview over the research literature, 41 clusters and 11 superordinate topics were identified. Major developments of research attention are outlined by analyzing bibliometric data of the period from 2000 to 2020. Overall growth in terms of research attention measured by the development of yearly citations per article is best noticeable in clusters ‘corporate social responsibility’, ‘brand’, and ‘corporate (-governance)’, and in superordinate topics ‘performance’, ‘education’, and ‘corporate (board/ management)’. There are also indicators for an overall increase of research attention and cluster variety. The synthesis provides an insight into most trending superordinate topics. Therefore, this literature review gives a comprehensive and descriptive overview as well as an insight into thematic trend developments of the research field.
We have analyzed a pool of 37,839 articles published in 4,404 business-related journals in the entrepreneurship research field using a novel literature review approach that is based on machine learning and text data mining. Most papers have been published in the journals ‘Small Business Economics’, ‘International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business’, and ‘Sustainability’ (Switzerland), while the sum of citations is highest in the ‘Journal of Business Venturing’, ‘Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice’, and ‘Small Business Economics’. We derived 29 overarching themes based on 52 identified clusters. The social entrepreneurship, development, innovation, capital, and economy clusters represent the largest ones among those with high thematic clarity. The most discussed clusters measured by the average number of citations per assigned paper are research, orientation, capital, gender, and growth. Clusters with the highest average growth in publications per year are social entrepreneurship, innovation, development, entrepreneurship education, and (business-) models. Measured by the average yearly citation rate per paper, the thematic cluster ‘research’, mostly containing literature studies, received most attention. The MLR allows for an inclusion of a significantly higher number of publications compared to traditional reviews thus providing a comprehensive, descriptive overview of the whole research field.