An Intellectual Structure of National Distance Research in International Business Journals

The purpose of this paper is to depict the research paradigm of cross-national distance in International Business(IB) in order to gain a more profound understanding of the relevance of the research topic. In addition, comparisons were made with fields of psychology and sociology in order to seek further possible topics for inclusion in future IB research. Therefore, we adopt the Author Co-citation Analysis(ACA) bibliometric analysis as a new approach in hopes to lead the future research trends. The result indicate that distance is widely adopted in diverse studies. In the IB field, national, organizational, theoretical, and global approach clusters were classified. The analysis of Psychology and Sociology journals directs future research to the person-to-person level, which includes the distance between headquarters and local subsidiaries.