A General Overview of Studies on Authentic Leadership (1978-2022): A Bibliometric Analysis

This study aims to examine studies on authentic leadership published in WoS indices between 1978 and 2022 utilising the bibliometric analysis method. Research data were retrieved from papers on authentic leadership using the WoS Core Collection database. Of the papers, 1,483 that met the study’s inclusion criteria were examined via descriptive and bibliometric analysis methods. Based on descriptive analysis methods, we established that there was a general increase in the number of studies on authentic leadership except for 2022, and 2021 saw the highest number of papers, papers were published in Leadership Quarterly the most, the country that published the most papers was the USA, and that these papers were written mainly in the English language. When analysing the bibliometric analysis results and based on citation analysis, the most attributed author, paper, journal, and institution on authentic leadership were William L. Gardner, Authentic Leadership: Development and Validation of a Theory-Based Measure, Leadership Quarterly, University of Nebraska, respectively. Regarding co-authorship analysis, Lucas Monzani and Rolf van Dick as authors, the Catholic University of Leuven as the institution, and the United States of America as the country had higher link strengths. We found in the co-concept analysis (keyword) analysis that the most repeated concepts were authentic leadership and leadership concepts, respectively, and some current concepts on authentic leadership in recent years were COVID-19, meta-analysis, subjective well-being, administration, information exchange, self-sufficiency, employee creativity, and organisational citizenship.