Productivity and Collaboration in the Talent
Management field (1990- 2013)*
Eva Gallardo-Gallardo1,2, Pedro Gallo2 & Nicky Dries3
1Universitat
Oberta de Catalunya, 2Universitat de Barcelona & 3KU Leuven
* This paper has already been presented at the 2nd EIASM Workshop on Talent Management (Brussels, October 2013)
INTRODUCTION: Why is it worth asking how much do we know about Talent Management research?
The well-known phrase ‘the war for talent’ introduced by a group of McKinsey consultants in late 1990s sparked off the interest for talent management (TM).
Over the last two decades, TM has become an increasingly popular topic (Chuai, Preece, & Iles, 2008; Höglund, 2012) and TM literature has experienced substantial
growth, especially in recent years (Jones, 2008; Iles, Preece, & Chuai, 2010). Indeed, deep in an economic downturn, TM is seen as a key management issue for
organizations worldwide (Bhatnagar, 2008; Mäkelä, Björkman, & Ehrnrooth, 2010; Thunnissen, Boselie & Fruytier, 2013), since it is considered a critical element for organizational success
and sustainability. TM is hot!
Despite its growing popularity there is a lack of clarity regarding TM definition, scope and overall goals (Collings & Mellahi, 2009; Garrow & Hirsh, 2008; Lewis & Heckman, 2006).
Although Thunnissen, Boselie and Fruytier (2013) made an attempt to provide a critical review of the academic literature on TM, there has been no full review study of
the scientific production about it.
Hence, a ‘research on research’ analysis will contribute towards a better understanding of TM more generally, and of the academic progress and remaining
gaps thus far specifically.
OBJECTIVE: To offer objective data that describe the reality of the TM research focusing on productivity and collaboration
METHODOLOGY:
Step 1: Data
retrieval
Step 2:
Refinement of
the results
•
•
•
•
Bibliometric analysis. A sequential three-step approach was followed:
Searches on TM in WoS and Scopus
Keywords: ‘talent’ and ‘management’’ (in title, abstract/topic or Keywords)
Period of time considered: 1990 – 2013 (until May)
Limited to those published in English in peer-reviewed journals and those that
have the full text available.
Each publication was codified according to 42 different fields,
such as:
Step 3: Data
codification
• The information of the articles retrieved from each search were exported to
Microsoft Excel 2011
• Duplicates articles were removed  List of 735 publications
• Full text was obtained  32 publications were impossible to find or acquire 
703 final number of publications
article ID, Number of authors, Author’s position, Family Name,
name,
Affiliation,
Country,
Co-authored?,
International
collaboration, collaboration within the same institution or with
Spanish institutions, year, title, Journal title, Volume, Issue,
Impact Factor, initial page, final page, number of references,
Abstract, Keywords (up to 6).
SOME FINDINGS:
Productivity:
Collaboration (co-authorship):
Scientific production in time:
Collaboration index ration of 0.55 authors per document.
Figure 1
428 documents out of 703 were written in collaboration 
60.88% of the documents were co-authored.
Dispersion of the scientific production:
Figure 4
- Wide variety of journals (353 in total; average
papers per journal = 1.99)
- These journals can be subsumed under three
wide areas: HRM, Knowledge Management and
Health Management.
- TM research is scattered in 49 countries:
Figure 2
Authors’ productivity:
Figure 5
-It is low
-Average papers per author = 1.12
-2.12% of the authors published more than 2
articles; 0.86% more than 4.
Figure 6
Figure 3
Institutional distribution of publications:
- The most productive institution was Harvard
University (26 papers), followed by the National
University of Ireland (17 papers), IBM (16 papers)
and Accenture (15 papers).  Among the top 5
institutions more than half are companies or
consultancies.
- Non-academic contributions from USA can be the
cause of the extended belief that TM literature is
mainly practitioner oriented
The most common collaboration is between 2
authors, followed by signatures of 3 authors.
International collaboration is low and it is quite
recent!
The Spanish number of collaborations is growing
but it is mainly within the same university.
CONCLUSIONS: TM is a quite new field that fights for consolidation
TM literature is characterized by an initial very moderate start in terms of publications
and collaborations followed by a rather intense increase in both dimensions, as it is
expected from a discipline that is still developing.
It shows a great amount of dispersion in journals and authors which is another
unambiguous statement of the immaturity of the field.
This paper is the first one to address a complete and in-depth analysis of
the structure of the TM field as an academic discipline. It will allow new
researchers into the field to be fully aware of seminal authors and mustread articles, as well as identifying those journals and institutions most
closely related to this subject.
Collaborations are quite recent in time, and mostly occur within the same
organization.
Any doubts/suggestions/comments? Contact me: [email protected]