Absorptive capacity: Three decades of advances and paths for future studies

Abstract

The objective of this research is to outline the landscape of international scientific productions on the topic of absorptive capacity (ACAP) in order to map the academic contributions made between 1990 and 2023. This is a bibliometric study with an exploratory and descriptive approach, grounded in three main laws: Bradford's Law, which assesses the productivity of journals; Lotka's Law, which analyzes the scientific productivity of authors; and Zipf's Law, which examines word frequency. Data collection considered academic production on ACAP from articles published in journals, specifically using the Web of Science database. The Bibliometrix package and VOSviewer were used as bibliometric analysis tools. The findings revealed a total of 3,187 articles published between 1990 and 2023. Bradford's Law identified the top five journals in the field: Journal of Knowledge Management, Journal of Business Research, Sustainability, International Business Review, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Lotka's Law showed that most authors published only one article (4,819 authors), with a small number of authors publishing two articles (821 authors). Zipf's Law indicated that the most cited words were "absorptive capacity," "performance," "innovation," "dynamic capabilities," and "antecedents." The bibliometric analysis demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach for analyzing large volumes of scientific data, highlighting the importance of data quality and indexing processes.