Ecosystems in scientific literature on business and economics from the perspective of multidimensional bibliometric analysis

Analysis of publications indexed in the Scopus system showed rapid growth of works with the term “ecosystem” in the title. The role of bibliometrics as a tool for identifying and analyzing research trends is increasing constantly. A study of the available publications on the ecosystem approach in various electronic resources shows that the scientific task of systematizing their topics, more fully taking into account internal and external interdisciplinary relationships, various aspects of research and identifying significant trends is becoming more and more urgent. The purpose of the study is to assess the degree and aggregated dynamics of the ecosystem approach in publications indexed in EconLit and Scopus (on business and economics), highlighting the main research trends and examples of notable works. The method of multidimensional bibliometric analysis of scientific literature on business and economics acts as a tool. It includes a general scheme based on the model of N-Tuple of Helices, an interrelated presentation of options for the analysis of publication activity, terminological and lexical analysis and structural-morphological analysis based on the most authoritative subject classifications JEL and ASJC, and the use of programs such as VOSviewer. Analysis of publications showed that since the end of the XX century there had been significant quantitative and structural changes in the composition of ecosystem studies. Every year various aspects get increasingly interweaved, both within the areas of “Business” and “Economics”, and through the ties with other areas of knowledge. The experience showed that the proposed version of bibliometric analysis expands the framework of understanding both the ecosystem approach in the scientific literature on business and economics, and on a number of other pressing problems. At the same time, we should not render the possibilities of bibliometric analysis absolute, just like with any method involving statistical processing of data arrays ever growing due to digitalization processes. The directions for further research include the expansion of econometrics for processing time series with the number of publications, the use of several complementary options for morphological analysis, the involvement of other databases (SSRN, Elibrary) and some others.