SMEs and entrepreneurship: a lexicometric and structural analysis of works published in Revue internationale PME (1988-2020)
This work analyzes 588 articles and research notes published in 98 issues of the Revue internationale PME (RIPME), from its first issue (1988) to the last issue of the year fully available to conduct our analysis (2020). On the basis of a literature review on the points of convergence and divergence between SME and entrepreneurship as a theoretical field, we answer the following question: how has the scientific discourse within RIPME evolved? To this end, we mobilize an automated textual data analysis methodology that focuses on the title and abstract of the 588 texts. We identify the most frequently used vocabulary and its evolution over time according to three periods: 1988-1998, 1999-2009 and 2010-2020. A hierarchical top-down classification, using the Reinert method, allows us to identify three major vocabulary classes: (1) SME, (2) entrepreneurship, and (3) context. For each of these classes we describe the temporal dynamics. While SME oriented texts remain dominant, entrepreneurship texts are gaining more and more space while context related texts are decreasing. With respect to the relevance of these classes, we can categorize the 588 texts, which allows us to observe interconnections. These results allow us to propose five dimensions of convergence related to SME and entrepreneurship work.