THE INNER SPARK: A BIBLIOMETRIC JOURNEY THROUGH INTRINSIC MOTIVATION IN ENTREPRENEURIAL RESEARCH
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35631/IJEMP.934034Keywords:
Bibliometric Analysis, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Intention, Intrinsic Motivation, Self-Determination TheoryAbstract
Research on entrepreneurship has increasingly emphasised the relevance of intrinsic motivation, as it explains entrepreneurial action beyond financial incentives and necessity-based opportunity recognition. Previous reviews have focused on entrepreneurial motivation, social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial intention, and other frameworks grounded in motivation. However, most of these reviews have used conceptual or systematic synthesis methods. Therefore, minimal attention has been given to mapping the intellectual and citation landscape of research that directly links intrinsic motivation to entrepreneurship. To fill this gap, this paper offers a bibliometric review of the literature on intrinsic motivation in entrepreneurship published in the Scopus database from 1995 to 2025. In the final stage, the dataset consisted of 323 English-language publications. The analysis included publication growth, document and source types, subject area distribution, source titles, keyword trends, citation metrics, highly cited articles, co-authorship network, and keyword co-occurrence network using VOSviewer and Publish or Perish. The results showed that the field is journal-centric, with 74.61% of publications and 76.16% of source types being articles and journals, respectively. The topic has become more of an academic interest since 2017, and publication production peaked in 2025, showing a clear increase. The citation analysis shows 8,714 citations, an average of 281.10 citations per year. This implies the high citation visibility and intellectual maturity. The network analysis shows the authors’ collaboration. The co-occurrence of the keywords emphasises significant thematic clusters, such as entrepreneurial motivation, social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial intention and prosocial motivation. These findings suggest that intrinsic motivation is key to autonomy, competence, intention formation, self-efficacy and entrepreneurial agency across social, institutional and sectoral contexts. Overall, this study contributes to the literature by examining the conceptual, citation, collaborative and theoretical landscape of intrinsic motivation research in entrepreneurship. It also suggests future directions for longitudinal, cross-cultural, theory-driven and mechanism-focused research.
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