A scientometric history of the <i>Journal of Management History</i>: 30 years creating an invisible college in the management and organizational studies (MOS)

Purpose The Journal of Management History (JMH) is the leading source for management and business history according to the Journal Citation Reports 2022 and has played a central role in facilitating the discussions and investigations that advance management history thought and research. This work provides a historical overview of the journal’s 30-year history and an analysis of the JMH invisible college – the group of scholars who form a scholarly community around the journal – through a bibliometric and scientometric analysis of the journal from 2006 to 2022. Design/methodology/approach This article investigates the socio-cognitive nature of the journal’s invisible college, describing the history of the journal in the field of management and organizational studies (MOS), and analyzing patterns of co-citation, co-word, co-authorship and sources that cited papers published in JMH between 2006 and 2022 to produce an interpretative description of the linkages and associations between different intellectual roots, topic trends and schools of thought developed in JMH . Findings Findings reveal that the journal is a big tent, with several types of schools of thought and topics represented, including traditional, critical, post and modern perspectives in management history scholarship. In addition, the range of topics covered was extensive in the contribution to administrative management and organizational theory. The invisible college seems to function as a fragmented adhocracy with a strong polycentric oligarchy leading the research agenda based on the History Division in the Academy of Management. Originality/value The methodology provides a new approach to identifying and understanding the invisible college regarding intellectual roots, schools of thought and topics researched. Moreover, the results allow an understanding of the structure of the invisible college around JMH and its similarities with the MOS structure, providing useful information for authors and editors to guide the research agenda around the study of management history.