Outlining new product development research through bibliometrics

Purpose: New product development (NPD) is a noteworthy field that has attracted the attention of scholars for its relevance for firm success. Based on bibliometric indicators and spatial distance network analysis, the authors outline the general structure overview of NPD research through the last 40 years of scientific production; identify and categorize key articles, authors, journals, institutions, and countries related to NPD research; identify and map the research subareas that have mostly contributed to the construction of NPD intellectual structure. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach: The work uses the Web of Science Core Collection and the visualization of similarities viewer software. The analysis searches for all the documents connected to NPD available in the database. The graphical visualization maps the bibliographic data in terms of bibliographic coupling and co-citation. Findings: The general NPD citation pattern evidences a construction of knowledge and learning, as evidenced in different subjects, such as biology or physics. Relevant contributions and contributors are highlighted as journals, articles, researchers, countries and institutions in overall NPD research and in its constituent subfields. Five subareas related to the NPD field based on journals and authors network are identified: marketing; operations and production; strategy; industrial engineering and operations; and management. Originality/value: This paper contributes to the NPD literature by offering a global perspective on the field by using bibliometric data graphical networks, providing insights about the influence of individual actors and its contributions to build bridges between the different subfields of research in NPD.